Music and Its Masters

by O. B. Boise

The North American Indians, despite the demoralizing influences of traders, agencies, and fire-water, are noble men as compared with the cannibals just considered. Many of their less amiable traits are doubtless the fruits of white intruders' avarice, which has from the first set aside equity when dealing with the red man. They live having a future state in view in the happy hunting-grounds, which stimulates in them a strict, but not too comprehensive, moral consciousness. Those conditions of life which mould race characteristics have in the case of the North American Indian developed bodily activity, close observation, bravery, and reasoning faculties, though crude. They lack delicate sensibility and imagination, but still in them we find nomadic manhood at its best, and their music mirrors their character.

Their war, funeral, and joyous songs are alike monotonous to modern Aryan ears, for they are devoid of romance and fine feeling, and are composed of repetitions ad libitum, instead of progressive developments. Their climaxes are produced through increased unction in delivery rather than through sequential means. They mark the primary pulsations of their songs through swaying the body, dancing, and through the use of rude instruments, and in so doing work themselves up to a remarkable state of exaltation. This result of their musical exercises must not be construed as indicating the presence of a strong, emotional element in the Indian character. They are, on the contrary, so stolid that few things can ruffle their equanimity. Their ecstasies are purposeful and self-induced.

Their phenomenal capacity for reading and interpreting nature's chronicle of the movements of living things, and its continual exercise, have blinded them, in a great degree, to the beauties of landscape. They devote themselves to the analysis of details instead of to the contemplation of the Creator's harmonious ensemble, and they consequently develop little sense for the beautiful. The fundamental manifestation of this sense is, in normally endowed man, an appreciation of the forms and colors of material things. Upon this sense we may build responsiveness to the intangible and ideal, but without it we have no foundation for æsthetic taste. I can think of nothing more incongruous than an atmosphere of Bach fugues or Beethoven symphonies for a man who sees only tons of hay, feet of lumber, water-power, etc., while gazing upon nature's grand panorama. The music of the North American Indian is neither euphonious nor romantic, but it is distinctly more human than that of the South Sea Islanders, and its varying tribal phases permit the inference that it has, in their keeping, accumulated resources, however slight they may seem.

The Indian's character and music throw light upon the course of evolution during the first era, inasmuch as they, contrasted with those of the cannibal races, tend to substantiate my claim that sound expression takes its cue from attendant culture, advancing in pace with it.

PROFANE HISTORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT

At that remotest period upon which the historian can throw light (about 3000 B.C.) the Valley of the Nile was the scene of undertakings the fruits of which have ever since excited the wonder of the world. The Pyramids, the somewhat later-built Palace of Karnak, and Temples of Luxor and Ipsambul stand first among the phenomenal conceptions of human architects; and the mechanical skill required in handling the massive blocks and pillars of which they are composed would severely test the appliances of our practical and inventive age. These monumental buildings, their consistent environments, and the deciphered records of scientific and literary accomplishments in those earliest historic times, bespeak broad culture. As we possess no record of a race from whom the Egyptians could have drawn either stimulus or knowledge itself, their culture was presumably indigenous, and therefore of slow growth. The Palace of Karnak, for instance, marks the climax of accomplishment in a line of architectural endeavor which may have begun soon after the Nile commenced making her alluvial deposits.

The persistent and audacious ambition which this long course of development attests, and the art feeling expressed in their works, endows Egyptian interest in music, as evinced through the scientific treatises mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, with especial significance. They were more learned and less pedantic than the Chinese, and were, besides, emotional and imaginative, although sadly superstitious. Had that high enlightenment permeated all classes of the people, Egypt would have been an Elysium for our art, but it was, unfortunately, confined to the upper social grades, which embraced the priests, and to a certain extent the warriors.

The masses, in company with prisoners of war and slaves from Central Africa, were mere servitors to the monarchs and priests in executing their ambitious schemes. Although their labor built up indubitable testimony to the greatness of their masters, the burdens imposed upon them century after century finally wore away their fealty; therefore the decadence and downfall of great Egypt. There could not possibly have been anything like art enthusiasm among a people so oppressed. Despite this vital lack, ancient Egypt did more, directly and indirectly, to foster music, and to give it an onward impulse, than all other agencies of the first era combined. This was somewhat attributable to the fact that then, for the first time, tone expression was associated with rhythmic texts; still, I infer that their music was merely an accessory to euphonious declamation,—subservient to poetry,—for had their melodies possessed independent import, those resourceful people would have found some way of recording them. These relations between music and poetry were perpetuated in Greece; indeed, our art was not accorded equality as a contributive element in song until in quite modern times. There have been several distinct epochs in this relationship,—viz., that in which tone expression, because of its little understood capacities was held in vassalage to her sister art; music's equality (dating from the adoption of notation), during which she greatly extended and beautified her forms; her ascendency, which characterized the vocal works of the early part of the present century; and now the Wagner school, in which the two are again made to collaborate on equal terms.

The ancient Egyptians employed pan pipes, flutes, horns, instruments of percussion, and small harps. Mural pictures of the fourth dynasty represent players blowing upon pipes of different lengths, and consequently of different pitches, which is a dumb declaration that at least some principles regulating the simultaneous use of tones had been recognized. Outside this pictorial record, we can find no intimation that anything analogous to modern harmony was known and practised by this people. In the absence of specific data we are forced to predicate the condition of music in that stupendous, though exclusive, civilization, upon the elements of the atmosphere from which it drew its impulse. As the more prominent of these elements were profound religious feeling, scientific learning, insatiable ambition, and a clearly pronounced lyric tendency, their melodies must have been coherent and expressive.

ARYAN RACE