CHAPTER V
The Orientals Make Their Music—Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Burmese, and Javanese
To hear two Chinamen exchanging greetings on a street corner, you would think they were singing or rather chanting, not because their tones are particularly pleasant for they are high and nasal and hard, but because they are talking in their own peculiar way. The Chinese have what is called an inflected language in which they use many tones. For example the syllable “hi” in one tone will mean one thing and it will mean something else entirely in each different inflection. Here again is a case where it is hard to say where speech ends and song begins. Another amusing thing about the Chinese is the way, according to our ideas, they seem to twist every thing around, so that what we call high tones they call low tones; they wear white for mourning and we wear black; their guests of honor sit at the left of the host and ours sit at the right; they consider taking off the hat very bad manners and of course we consider it bad manners for a man to keep it on in the house or when talking to a lady.
They never used their music as a way of expressing beauty as other nations have done, but treated it as we would a problem in arithmetic or a cross-word puzzle, and they loved to write articles on the subject that would seem long and dull to us. However, as far back as 2255 B.C. Ta Shao composed a piece of music which Confucius, 1600 years later, said, “enchanted him to such an extent that he did not know the taste of food for months.”
After a print by Gakutei—about 1840.
The Koto-Player.
After print by Kuniyasu—about 1830.
The Wandering Samisen-Player.
Scales
Their scale was the pentatonic and they had the queerest names for their degrees or steps.
| F | the | first | degree | was | called | Emperor |
| G | „ | 2d | „ | „ | „ | Prime Minister |
| A | „ | 3d | „ | „ | „ | Loyal Subjects |
| C | „ | 4th | „ | „ | „ | Affairs of State |
| D | „ | 5th | „ | „ | „ | Mirror of the World |