‘Orchestra’ of Pan’s Pipes.

From a photograph reproduced in Stumpf’s ‘Anfänge der Musik’.

In the British museum there is a Pan’s pipe consisting of a double row of reeds bound together exactly opposite each other; a sort of double Pan’s Pipes. Each series consists of seven reed pipes, and while one series of pipes remains open, allowing the free passage of air through them, all the pipes of the second series have been closed at the lower end. Now, to stop a pipe at the bottom has the effect of raising its pitch an octave. It was evidently the intention that two of these pipes should be blown at once and when this is done through the whole series the following succession of tones is produced:

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This is a five-toned or pentatonic scale, the last two tones being merely duplicates in octave of the first two. The scale of five tones, arranged in varying sequence, is a primitive form of scale. While not so primitive as some (scales of three or four tones, for instance), it is still much more so than the scales on which our modern art of music is based.

Another specimen of ancient Peruvian ‘Pan’s Pipes,’ at present in the New York Museum of Natural History, gives the following scale: