There are whole forests of bamboo in China and immense quantities are floated down the great rivers to the towns and cities; the province of Shantung is celebrated for the small hard sort, which for certain uses has a preference. Just as in Greece we alluded to a kind specially sought for musical purposes. It would, we can understand, be natural for the early tribes to settle down beside the river; and, when a plot of land was selected, the house was built with bamboo, and furnished with domestic articles of bamboo, and the implements of husbandry and fishing were all made of this wonderful plant. With the river to give him fish, and the land to yield him crops of millet and rice, the man was happy. The custom obtains to the present day to devote some portion of land round the house on which to cultivate the bamboo. This portion is surrounded by a ditch filled with water supplied from the river by a tiny canal, and here these luxuriant grasses grow; for the bamboo is but a gigantic grass, and the domestic wants find this grove a perpetual storehouse of supply. Conceive such a picture: the man after his day’s toil sitting beside this grove, not in lazy ease, but intently engaged upon a heap of little bamboo sticks, measuring, cutting, comparing, and pondering over some problem, some scheme upon which his mind is fixed; only now and then looking upward and catching sight of the grey turtle doves and their little rose coloured feet clinging to the branch stems above him. No sound disturbing the great silence of the plain, only the doves mildly cooing as if in answer to the sounds that come from his lips in intervals of meditative musing; and the sounds of the bees in the flowers; and the softer sounds of the flowing of the broad river in the distance. As the sunshine lights up his good humoured face, what is the thought that makes it brighten with his smile, and tells of satisfied attainment? Well may he feel content. He has perfected an idea; he has laid the foundation of the Sheng. And a very simple process it is, as I shall show you; for although it occasioned him serious pondering, once the idea had risen in his mind, the working out of the scheme was assured.
Some tribes in remote places in the east still have a rude prototype of the instrument, consisting of a hollow lump of clay with four or five pipes irregularly stuck in, and beyond that they have not proceeded; and such may have been the stage at which our ideal man with an order loving brain set about thinking. Now, truth to tell, I imagined myself to be this Chinaman, and wondered how, in such a position as his, and with only his means and his purposes, I should evolve such an instrument. Curiously enough, as it turned out, I hit upon the right idea, or as near proof of rightness as imagination need come to. Until I had worked out the scheme on this primitive basis, the instrument had been a puzzle to me, and it did not seem to me that any writer rightly understood it; and even the descriptions by musical experts were obviously erroneous when examined without prepossessions of the scholastic kind. The first instrument that came into my hands was perfect in structure, but incomplete in reeds, not more than four or five metal tongues remaining. The pitch of these I ascertained, and the relations happened to be useful for comparative deductions. It had long been a creed with me that disease and death are our best teachers; they cause us to question natural mechanism, injury and disorder, and make us desire to know relation and purpose in artificial mechanism also. Thus my poor Sheng incited me to wish to know its structural meaning, to ask how it came to be what it is.
Music was a pastime ages before it became an art. Religion is earlier than priesthood. I go therefore to the man who first made this form of instrument; question why he made it, how he took his first step, how he came to take his second, how he by process of thinking formed an instrument for himself and for others to play. His ancestors, I consider, came from the south, and in the early period would have used reeds with tongues cut in them after the fashion of the Arghool; but this man is an artificer, has more civilised ways in communities of industry, and is influenced by the beginnings of commerce. China is rich in mines of iron and copper and zinc, and her people were a deft fingered race, expert in delicate working of metals, and, at this stage of advance in simple arts the tongues of reed would be superseded by tongues of metal, thin and elastic, and free from the disadvantages of swelling by moisture and of the need of frequent renewals. Hence, in cutting such substitutes by the minute chisels they are so clever in using, the tongue or reed would naturally, and without design, turn out to be a free reed. A discovery having far reaching consequences, albeit long limited to the land of this peculiar people, due to the special deftness they have in the fine working of copper; for these reed plates are of little more than paper thickness. Just three cuts of a thin chisel, and the tongue is formed in the little brass plate; and the plate is fixed in its place with beeswax.
Let us imagine our worker to live at this particular period of growth of a civilised community, when music was scarcely more than a chirping of birds, or the aimless sounds which arose as rhythmical ebullition in dancing; when musical art was personal, unformed and any system of musical sounds as yet unthought of. Such a time there must have been in the history of every early race. Always, as I imagine, that the instrument coming, before the system, originates that liking in the human sentiency which heredity and custom confirm. The peculiarity of Chinese music corroborates this notion of mine; for although, so far as we can tell, the structure of musical ears is the same—yet likings of the ear vary widely with the difference in race.
One of the first needs of men in relation to one another in communities is a standard of measure of length, such as a cubit, a foot, etc. The oldest standard with the Chinese is the thumb’s breadth, and ten thumbs’ breadths make one Chinese foot; and they had a measure of millet seed, as we have our three barley corns making one inch. Our worker then had his measure of the foot, for that is the standard he sets out with for his longest pipe, from which all the rest originate. It is 9-7/8in. of our measure; and by the same custom the longest pipe of the twelve lüs which are mythically attributed to the Yellow Emperor, is of like length. So the Chinese foot predetermined the standard both for the reed pipe of bamboo with a tongue of metal, and for the reed pipe blown across as the pandean pipe is blown across: which pipe from immemorial days has remained in the imperial archives, as the unalterable standard of pitch—unalterable because nature does not alter.
I had a metal organ-pipe made to the precise length and diameter of this imperial standard, and it proved to be what we call e flat; which, as I found out, has a significant relation, for our free reed pipe of this length gives a sound one fourth lower exactly—namely B flat. And this relation of the fourth dominates everything in the evolution of music. Our worker found this out; though knowing nothing of the interval of the fourth, he fixed it by natural evolution,—by measure, not by music: yet the measure afterwards made the music and the law of the music. I see him cut reeds as our country boys do from our grasses and spiers, and split a tongue on the side of one, as his ancestors had done centuries before, and make a piping-bird sound from it. He has some knowledge of the working of metals; is an adept at it; has by socialisation and its wants become an artificer in brass. The split reed becomes spoilt after frequent use, so he conceived the thought of making a substitute in metal.
Let us picture him first as taking a bamboo reed, cutting it a foot long in Chinese length (9-7/8in.), and from this obtaining a note; then cutting other reeds promiscuously, until at last he is attracted by one exactly half its length, giving a baby note exactly the same in seeming as the other, and blending into it. This is what we call the octave,—a civilized perceptivity not yet dawning on his mind; to him it is the man’s voice and then the woman’s voice. The higher repetition of the same sound. He has halved the length and obtained unwittingly the octave; why not halve the other half between? This he does, and from the three quarter length of pipe obtains a new sound, which, sounded with his prime gives a pleasing concord; thus, he begins to recognise the new fact,—the family relationship.
After this fashion of halving and quartering I imagined that the Sheng grew and became an instrument; and, placing myself in this mood of representative thought, I also try and work the thing as he would have worked it out, and see if I can get coinciding results. The half and the half again seem to me so natural; the repetition is so akin to the Chinese tendency. A two thirds is a more artificial notion, and comes of later discernment. How natural too, it is on finding more that two pipes inconvenient within the mouth, to seek the first substitute similar to the mouth in size, such as a little bowl, a half gourd, or perhaps the same calabash that served him for a drinking cup. Except the four or five reeds that spoke in my specimen, I did not know what the notes should be as the scale of the instrument; I only knew that the scheme as told me by the writers with authority was wrong, and was also misleading; for the comparative speaking length of the pipes was at variance with the assumed musical system, and I could not make head or tail of the instrument until I resorted to the question of primitive design. Then everything fell into proper place with unlooked-for significance. So I took a number of slips of wood (easier to cut than bamboo), and proceeded to transmigrate myself into a dweller in “far Cathay.”
Adopting the measure of the Chinese foot to start with, I cut a slip to that length, and then cut one to half of that, and then cut one between these at the half of the half, and so on by progressive steps halving and half halving and doubling, and obtained a connected series of thirteen slips to represent the speaking pipes of my most mysterious little Sheng. I argued with myself that in some such simple way our worker would have evolved the instrument; that it was by no means the outcome of a system of music, but was built up on a visible relation of proportions; that the eye made it and that the ear accepted it. Steadied by faith, I drew my bow at a venture, and, lo and behold!—my arrow went home true, and I was astonished as one who sees his prophecy fulfilled and wonders how it came to pass. For when I came to compare and to measure the actual pipe lengths, they corresponded length for length with the series I had evolved by my archaic process. I confess that the situation was bewildering as I gazed upon the evidence before me, for it seemed too good to be true, and one had a fleeting suspicion of magic or hallucination of some kind. But no; reason and time only increased the strength of my conviction that in this process the Sheng was constructively worked out; indeed, I do not see how by any other way the peculiar scale of the instrument could have originated.
Sequence of Evolution of the Pipes of the Sheng.