I.
ERY important developments of the art of music took place in India from a remote period, but dates are entirely uncertain. When the hymns of the Rig-Veda were collected into their present form, which appears to have been about 1500 B.C., music was highly esteemed. It was in India that the art of inciting vibrations of a string by means of a bow was discovered; and our violin had its origin there, but the date is entirely unknown. The primitive violin was the ravanastron, which the Ceylonese claim to have been invented by one of their kings, who reigned about 5000 B.C. The form of this instrument is given in Fig. 16. It must have been some time before the Mohammedan invasion, for they brought a rude violin back to Arabia, from whence it came into Europe after the crusades. They had many forms of guitar, instruments of percussion, and the varieties of viol, as well as trumpets and the like. The national instrument was the vina. This was a sort of guitar, its body made of a strip of bamboo about eight inches wide and four feet long. Near each end a large gourd was fixed, for reinforcing the resonance. In playing, it was held obliquely in front of the player, like a guitar, one gourd resting upon the left shoulder, the other under the right arm. It was strung with six strings of silk and wire, and had a very elaborate apparatus of frets, much higher than those of a guitar, many of them movable, in order to permit modulation into any of the twenty-four Hindoo "modes." The instrument had a light, thin tone, not unpleasing. A fine specimen is figured in "Hipkins' Plates of Rare Instruments" in the South Kensington Museum, a copy of which may be seen in the Newberry Library.
Fig. 15.
JIWAN CHAH.
[Portrait of Jiwan Chah, one of the latest masters of the vina. He died about 1790.]
The Hindoos carried the theory of music to an extremely fine point, having many curious scales, some of them with twenty-four divisions in an octave. Twenty-two was the usual number. The pitch of each note in every mode was accurately calculated mathematically, and the frets of the vina located thereby, according to very old theoretical works by one Soma, written in Sanskrit at least as early as 1500 B.C. When this work first became known to Europeans, its elaboration led it to be regarded as a purely theoretical fancy piece, and it was thought to be impossible that practical musicians could have been governed by theories apparently so fine-drawn. A study of the structure of the vina, however, perfectly adapted to these theories, set all doubts at rest. None of the intervals of the Hindoo scale exactly correspond to our own. Harmony they never conceived. Well sounding chords are impossible in their scales. All their music was monodic—one-voiced.
