Remember that at the time of my investigation—now thirty years ago—I had no means of knowing what the scale should be, and I had to calculate from the relative lengths of the thirteen slips what the notes of the speaking pipes would be; and when in after years I came to possess other specimens of the instrument, I found that all my conclusions had been correct.
A very impressive result is the discovery that the old Chinese musical basis was that of the Greeks,—the tetrachord; and the complete scale of this, one of the most ancient of Chinese instruments, consists of two conjunct tetrachords and one disjunct tetrachord; which scale, as I have said, being founded upon a natural law of progression from or through a connected series of proportional lengths, exhibits unchanged its record of evolution. For pipes of certain length give now the same tones and the same actual pitches as they gave thousands of years ago. They do not change, though modes and customs, peoples and empires change. How remarkably suggestive is this taken with the presence of the Pan’s pipes and the Phœnix, to which your attention was given in a previous chapter, as pointing to a common origin in some ancient era ere history began. Helmholtz notes that Olympos (circa B.C. 660-620), who introduced Asiatic flute music into Greece and adapted it into Greek tastes, transformed the Greek Doric scale into one of five tones, the old enharmonic scale,
b ‿ c— —e ‿ f— —a
This, he says, seems to indicate that he brought a scale of five tones with him from Asia. And this same scale you will find in the scale of the Sheng. I gave all this evidence respecting the scale of the Sheng more than twenty-five years ago, to Mr. Ellis; but it was a long time before he could bring himself to believe that Amiot and other leading writers had given altogether misleading statements. He went and pored over the big folio volumes of Amiot’s “Mémoires des Chinois” (1780), utterly confused; and only in later times, when investigating for his work of marvellous patience, “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” did he see that truly the tetrachord was the basis of Asiatic music as it was of Greek music.
How was it that Amiot, living with the Chinese, gave a wrong drawing of the free reed used in the Sheng? How came he to say with authority that its thirteen pipes were a succession of semitones? How came he to select f as the tonic of the scale? Engel falls into the same notion of thirteen pipes giving the same octave of semitones as ours, but says that the e and b were exceptional notes, only used occasionally.
Order of the Pipes as they Stand in the Sheng.
Fig. 30.
The illustration gives the series of holes into which the pipes are fitted on the top of the covered bowl. Pipes 1, 9, 16, 17 are mutes, only placed for symmetry. Be careful in references not to confuse the numerals as to order of pipes with those of the sequence and scale.