The popular music of any people is, in a great measure, the thermometer of its physical sensitiveness and its moral sentiments; and the reason of this is evident. The shepherd tending his flock, the fisherman mending his nets, the soldier on the march, the peasant at the plough, has no inducement to sing unless his heart's emotion incite him to it. A true national music is, then, what the Germans call Volksmusik, and, springing from the hearts of the people, it is psychologically one of their best interpreters. For this reason the composers of national melodies are seldom known to fame. A national song composes itself: the musician's lyre is the musician's heart, and from the sorrow, triumph and travail of life comes the child of song.
The assertion, then, that music is a universal language is only half true: it has a great variety of dialects; and it is this very sensitiveness to human influence which makes it so universally eloquent. Let us turn first to the East, for it still retains its primitive music, and at this very hour some muezzin is calling from his minaret or some Jew intoning his Talmud in the same musical cadence with which Syrian maidens sang the hymns to Cybele.
All Oriental music is distinguished by a pathetic, long—drawn, wailing monotony quite in keeping with the stationary and contemplative character of the people. We are struck at once with its frequent repetitions of one note and its short and cautious transitions, the intervals rarely being greater than a half, or at most a full, note. The conclusion of a measure is generally a descent, and the commencement of a new one seems to be a feeble effort to rise from the dreamy apathy in which Eastern imagination delights; but it is immediately followed by the fall of the rhythmus, re-establishing its languid repose. The frequent use of half notes induces a predominance of the minor key, and this, with the constant recurrence of the rhythmical fall, imparts to Semitic and Hindoo music that melancholy, lethargic uniformity which expresses in a striking manner the benumbed energies and undeveloped spirit of the people among whom it is found. When a race has substituted habit and custom for national feeling, its music is necessarily monotonous and characterless, for the stronger the national feeling of any people, the more intense, vivid and pronounced will be its music.
Hindoo music is almost untranslatable to Western ears, but Sir W. Jones, in an essay on the musical modes of the Hindoos—to be found in the third volume of the Asiatic Researches—makes an attempt to render one of their most popular songs. The original, of which he also gives a copy, looks like a mixture of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese characters, and how far our notation represents it it is impossible to say; for, though Sir W. Jones was an erudite Oriental scholar, that of itself would not render him a good translator of Hindoo music. The air is a song of love and spring, and the measure is indicated, "rapid and gay:"
Kindred to Semitic and Hindoo music, though venturing on bolder intervals, is Chinese, Persian and Arabian. The almost untranslatable airs of India assume in China something like an artless melody. Their smallest intervals are semitones, which have been in use, like everything else in China, from time immemorial. Nevertheless, in the diatonic series of seven intervals the Chinese usually avoid the two semitones by omitting the fourth and the seventh, so that their scale consists really of only five intervals, and as they regard F as their principal key (just as we regard C as ours), the Chinese scale stands thus:
CHINESE SCALE.
This scale is, however, by no means confined to China, but is met with in several Asiatic countries—Japan, Siam, Java, etc. In order to judge how it affects the character of music, I have copied the following Chinese air and Japanese song from Carl Engel's Researches into Popular Songs and Customs:
