Doubtless, the original readers understood the author, and filled in implied details which we are in the dark about. The ancient writers avoid telling us what we want most to know. It is, for instance, at times, doubtful whether the name reed always refers to the body of the pipe, or at times to the vibrating reed, and a writer or translator would easily fall into error if without practical knowledge of wind instruments, just as they do in similar matters of musical detail at the present time. Some ancient writers, we know, wrote only from reports on the subject of music, being themselves ignorant upon it, although they are in several instances our chief authorities for the learning of the ancients thereon.
To the description given by Mr. W. Chappell, he adds his own comment: “these reeds throw out shoots around them, and perhaps each row of shoots may have been counted as a year’s growth.” I am not so sure that a reed “pervious throughout” would throw off shoots; some such are merely sheathed like bulrushes and flags. The contention of Mr. Rowbotham that Antigenedes “must needs change the time of cutting flute reeds, in order to get crisp reeds, and reeds with small bores, and that they might give out these (Hemiolian Chromatic) querulous intervals” is not convincing, and the use of the word “querulous” betrays that he is “begging the question”; indeed, his point is that “the age was an age of quibbling and cavilling and hair splitting, and these subtleties of thought had their parallel or consequence in other things as well,”—including querulous flutes. This imagined correspondence between things and thoughts shews the writer to be clever as a special pleader, but that he is a specialist in wind instruments does not follow. The question is still open, did Theophrastus speak of flute reeds or of flute pipes, or of the reeds to be used for bulbs, or of those for making reed tongues?
Antigenedes wrote about the year 450 B.C., it is said, that he increased the number of holes of the flute. It is a curious coincidence that Ling Lun the Chinese minister of Huang-Ti, was also sent to a chosen spot, called Tahsia (since identified as Bactria, the mother of cities from its unrivalled antiquity) west of the Kuenlun mountains, where there is a valley called Chichku where bamboos of regular thickness grew, that he might there choose the finest sort for music, and thus set out the true lus or laws and principles. How strangely the Greeks and Chinese tales agree, that the pipes must be very choice, and of a particular growth.
Some years back, when I first entertained the idea that these bulbs figuring on the vases represented real hollow bulbs, I sought high and low for evidence of any species of reed growing with such distinct shape that it could be so employed. I made enquires of curators at South Kensington botanical departments, and also at Kew, but without success, and no botanist could afford me the information that I was anxious for. There was no reed, neither roots of reeds, anywhere answering the description.
Yet such reeds grew! It is because the nature of the growth of the reed has assumed a most interesting importance at the present stage of our investigations, that I have introduced these quotations from the ancient writers.
A very valuable piece of information has recently been obtained from Egypt, and we owe our knowledge of it to Mr. T. L. Southgate who read a paper at a Musical Association meeting, upon the pair of Egyptian flutes found and shown by Mr. Petrie. He had obtained tidings and measurements of similar pipes in foreign museums, and gave particulars of experiments as to pitch, and showed a model made according to details communicated to him by M. Maspero of a so-called flageolet with eleven holes, found in ancient Panopolis anterior to the eighteenth dynasty, 1500 B.C. This extraordinary find he stated, was furnished with a moveable beak of the whistle kind, and it gave a scale of semitones and two enharmonic intervals; and the scale, he maintained, corresponded almost exactly with our present chromatic scale. Thus the musical acquirement of the Egyptians was raised to a most exalted level, much beyond anything ascribed to that people, and some head-shakings and symptoms of unbelief became manifest among the curious musicians assembled. I confess that I was among the doubters. Neither the flageolet nor the scale seemed to me to conform to the genius of the people, as shown in their tablets of stone, or papyrus rolls, or wall paintings. The date 1500 B.C.—four hundred years older than the Lady Maket flutes—was understood to be fixed by M. Maspero, and confirmed by other recognised Egyptologists, and the genuineness of the relic seemed vouched for.
And now comes the strange part of the discovery. It was found that the supposed flageolet beak was no flageolet affair at all, neither in form nor purpose, and that what had been interpreted in the drawing as a whistle mouth was the representation merely of a patch of pitch or bitumen that had in ancient days got attached to the original. About as dumbfounding an experience as that which befel the renowned Mr. Pickwick at the deciphering of the ever memorable Roman inscription. We may now sing old Hummel’s chorus:—
“Light, light in darkness,
The daylight dawns;”
for the mistake brought out the secret, and the information long wanted was to be had for the asking, and came out in a very matter of fact way. M. Maspero says that the head piece found with the pipe was a hollow piece of reed, bulb shaped, and that it was a custom to grow such bulbs by subjecting the reed during its early growth to artificial constraint. Places in the reed would be chosen, round which, when it was about half an inch in diameter, a string or other fibre would be wound closely, and the reed so treated left otherwise to grow to its proper growth of about exteriorly three quarters of an inch. The artificial waist therefore remained with, say, a quarter inch interior diameter, whilst the other portion expanded in growth as usual, and thus these mysterious bulbs were formed. The explanation is delightfully simple, and the wonder is that no one thought of it before, for I expect that there are similar practices of reed torture going on in other parts of the world, which probably even our botanists could have made us acquainted with.