Meantime ancient China claims attention, for the Chinese hold a parallel course in time with the Egyptians. What has China to tell of earliest music?
CHAPTER XIII.
In the Land of China.
THE OUTSPREAD PHŒNIX.
The Chinese have always been fond of seeking the similitudes and contrasts existing between everything in heaven and earth. So far as they had attained in astronomical knowledge, the number of the planets was five; consequently there could be only five colours, five points of the compass, five elements, five primitive sounds, etc. Music was made the subject of many allegorical comparisons, as twelve moons, twelve sounds, twelve hours, twelve strings. And this strange propensity has quite perverted many of their records of history upon art and science; for whatever remained unknown or doubtful, appears to have been supplied with the utmost confidence upon some imaginary basis of affinity or relation of numbers mystically inevitable. The poetry of the symbol was lost in the pedantry of its exposition.
Certain facts we may accept, but not the garnishing with which the Chinese philosophers and teachers have surrounded them. Each instrument, according to their logical demand, had an inventor, and the scholastic notion has been to attribute the honour of the invention to an Emperor, and forthwith to account for every detail in it upon some system conformable to the wisdom of the scholastic mind.
Learning has always been greatly honoured in China, and the colleges of the mandarins held with rigid formalism to the doctrines they had received from the past, although it may have been a near past compared with the nation’s history; and so the mystical teachings of similitudes and affinities, and the occult control of nature by numbers, became to the students fixed verities of science, not to be questioned. What concerns us is that these teachings, as regards Chinese music and musical instruments, confront us with a mass of statements incongruous and contradictory. Something like our heraldic descents; the centuries pass, and the links are manufactured to give a factitious coherence to satisfy the desire for truth.
The P’ai-hsiao, here illustrated, is one of the ancient instruments belonging to the Chinese, who hold it to be symbolic, and to represent the phœnix with outspread wings, even as the Sheng represents the sacred bird sitting upon her nest. In both, no other reason can be assigned for the particular forms assumed by the instruments, the mystical idea is evidently deeply rooted in the race, and is ineffaceable.
Except for the questions of origin and development, the music of the Chinese can have but little attraction for us. But what I would point out as of interest, is that there have been periods of history during which particular musical systems held sway, with certain instruments in vogue, and with special methods devised in relation to them. In one age the tetrachord, in another the pentatone, in another the fusion of these, and in another the filling in of semitones to complete a scale seemingly akin to our chromatic. In the earlier periods the wind instruments prevailed, and determined the musical systems; and in later times the instruments with strings gave rise to new and elaborate discriminations.
