Fig. 26.
The Chinese P’ai-hsiao.
The stone chimes and the great bells should be adjudged to very ancient times, although in the rise and fall of dynasties the traditional tones have been changed, and perhaps newer traditions have usurped the old; until in the confusion, systems that in their origin were many centuries apart became mixed up together as of one growth. The abstruse theories with which the treatises of the learned are occupied, and the fantastic accretions of symbolism which seem to form the foundations of Chinese literature—all these make the way of the investigator difficult. The rational course is to leave them aside and go to the facts. The instruments themselves represent the past, and are valid evidence.
Père Amiot, of the French Jesuit mission, according to his works, published in 1780, appeared to be so well grounded in everything relating to Chinese history and customs that his statements upon their music passed without contradiction; and, indeed, so intimate a knowledge did he seem to possess that even confirmation of his views would have been considered needless. Such misplaced reliance has given a century’s permanence to misconceptions; and men of sagacity, in dealing with the matters in question, have blindly followed where Amiot led, each succeeding writer repeating the errors of former writers.
Western theorists prejudge questions of Asiatic music by being so wedded to one particular conception of what a scale ought to exhibit.
Ideas of octaves and fifths and of minor and major, and tone and semitone rule at every corner. The fortuitous nature of men’s devices in art is scarcely conceivable when rule and logic claim to divine how art developed. Europeans are ever prone to trouble in accounting for everything, and to desire—almost to design—that facts should fit theory, whether they will or not. The Asiatic mind is little understood by the European mind; and human nature being outwardly so much alike, we are puzzled at ways of thought and innate tendencies diverging greatly from our own. Whilst acknowledging a difference in organization, we yet deeming ours to be the proper standard; our likings to be natural, and foreigners’ likings to be queer, if not preposterous. John Chinaman’s ear is different to John Bull’s ear, somehow, if we could only find out how.
I find that mostly the scientific man is as bigoted as the superstitious man when he brings himself to talk of the beautiful fitness of nature’s designs, and of the unerring guidance for our behoof to be found in her operations, and so forth. Now, I know that it is customary to vaunt “nature’s teaching of harmony and the diatonic scale,” in the unconscious training she gives us in compounding quality of tone, and furnishing us with a chain of harmonics in a range so nearly out of discrimination of our hearing that, in our average daily life, we are blissfully unaware of the experiences to which we have been subjected. Backed though this doctrine is by the great name of Helmholtz, I confess that I find myself unable to admit its relevance.
First and foremost in the consideration of Chinese music is the fact that the Chinese have no care for our harmony: they will have none of it. Neither will they take to our diatonic scale: it offends their sense of art. Unisons and concords of two notes (as fourths and thirds, and their inversions) satisfy their sense of the harmonious. In this, certain other Eastern nations agree with them. The attempt to find an equal temperament scale as we understand it, of twelve semitones, fails as regards the old instruments.
The P’ai-hsiao is reported of as possessing a scale of twelve equally tempered semitones; the arrangement being of alternate notes right and left, the deepest notes being at each end, and the shortest pipes in the middle,—a plan adopted in organ building. Not having yet had an instrument of the kind in my hands, I cannot say anything by knowledge; but certainly the scale set out by Van Aalst is not semitonal. For he expressly selects five notes, three being a quarter tone lower and two a quarter tone higher than in a correct scale of the modern type. Even these named had better, I expect, have been named as only approximately a quarter tone wrong; there is no intentional quarter, but a fixed relation to some other notes which by coincidence seem to make agreement, but only more or less near. It is said that the pipes to the right hand are the male or yang-lüs, and to the left the yin-lüs or females; each class is in playing kept absolutely to itself, which is anything but chromatic in its system. There are sixteen pipes, all the odd numbers being yang, and all the even numbers yin. The pipes are arranged upon an ornamental frame; they correspond to the twelve lüs and the first four lüs of the grave series; and in notes said to correspond to those of the bell and stone chimes, the highest being treble b.
| The Te-ching, or One of the Chime. |
Fig. 27.