"My voice on high dispels the storm."
"I am called Ave Maria
I drive away storms."
"I who call to thee am the Rose of the World and am called
Ave Maria."
The Egyptian _sistrum_, which in Roman times played an
important role in the worship of Isis, was shaped somewhat
like a tennis racquet, with four wire strings on which rattles
were strung. The sound of it must have been akin to that of our
modern tambourine, and it served much the same purpose as the
primitive drum, namely, to drive away Typhon or Set, the god
of evil. Dead kings were called "Osiris" when placed in their
tombs, and _sistri_ put with them in order to drive away Set.
Beside bells and rattles we must include all instruments of the
tambourine and gong species in the drum category. While there
are many different forms of the same instrument, there are
evidences of their all having at some time served the same
purpose, even down to that strange instrument about which
Du Chaillu tells us in his "Equatorial Africa", a bell of
leopard skin, with a clapper of fur, which was rung by the
wizard doctor when entering a hut where someone was ill or
dying. The leopard skin and fur clapper seem to have been
devised to make no noise, so as not to anger the demon that
was to be cast out. This reminds us strangely of the custom of
ringing a bell as the priest goes to administer the last rites.
It is said that first impressions are the strongest and most
lasting; certain it is that humanity, through all its social and
racial evolutions, has retained remnants of certain primitive
ideas to the present day. The army death reveille, the minute
gun, the tolling of bells for the dead, the tocsin, etc., all
have their roots in the attributes assigned to the primitive
drum; for, as I have already pointed out, the more civilized
a people becomes, the more the word-symbols degenerate. It
is this continual drifting away of the word-symbols from the
natural sounds which are occasioned by emotions that creates
the necessity for auxiliary means of expression, and thus
gives us instrumental music.
Since the advent of the drum a great stride toward civilization
had been made. Mankind no longer lived in caves but built huts
and even temples, and the conditions under which he lived
must have been similar to those of the natives of Central
Africa before travellers opened up the Dark Continent to the
caravan of the European trader. If we look up the subject in
the narratives of Livingstone or Stanley we find that these
people lived in groups of coarsely-thatched huts, the village
being almost invariably surrounded by a kind of stockade. Now
this manner of living is identically the same as that of all
savage tribes which have not passed beyond the drum state
of civilization, namely, a few huts huddled together and
surrounded by a palisade of bamboo or cane. Since the pith
would decompose in a short time, we should probably find that
the wind, whirling across such a palisade of pipes--for that is
what our bamboos would have turned to--would produce musical
sounds, in fact, exactly the sounds that a large set of Pan's
pipes would produce. For after all what we call Pan's pipes
are simply pieces of bamboo or cane of different lengths tied
together and made to sound by blowing across the open tops.
The theory may be objected to on the ground that it scarcely
proves the antiquity of the pipe to be less than that of the
drum; but the objection is hardly of importance when we consider
that the drum was known long before mankind had reached the
"hut" stage of civilization. Under the head of pipe, the
trumpet and all its derivatives must be accepted. On this point
there has been much controversy. But it seems reasonable to
believe that once it was found that sound could be produced
by blowing across the top of a hollow pipe, the most natural
thing to do would be to try the same effect on all hollow
things differing in shape and material from the original
bamboo. This would account for the conch shells of the Amazons
which, according to travellers' tales, were used to proclaim
an attack in war; in Africa the tusks of elephants were used;
in North America the instrument did not rise above the whistle
made from the small bones of a deer or of a turkey's leg.
That the Pan's pipes are the originals of all these species
seems hardly open to doubt. Even among the Greeks and Romans
we see traces of them in the double trumpet and the double
pipe. These trumpets became larger and larger in form, and
the force required to play them was such that the player
had to adopt a kind of leather harness to strengthen his
cheeks. Before this development had been reached, however,
I have no doubt that all wind instruments were of the Pan's
pipes variety; that is to say, the instruments consisted of a
hollow tube shut at one end, the sound being produced by the
breath catching on the open edge of the tube.
Direct blowing into the tube doubtless came later. In
this case the tube was open at both ends, and the sound
was determined by its length and by the force given to the
breath in playing. There is good reason for admitting this new
instrument to be a descendant of the Pan's pipes, for it was
evidently played by the nose at first. This would preclude
its being considered as an originally forcible instrument,
such as the trumpet.
Now that we have traced the history of the pipe and considered
the different types of the instrument, we can see immediately
that it brought no great new truth home to man as did the drum.
The savage who first climbed secretly to the top of the
stockade around his village to investigate the cause of the
mysterious sounds would naturally say that the Great Spirit
had revealed a mystery to him; and he would also claim to be
a wonder worker. But while his pipe would be accepted to a
certain degree, it was nevertheless second in the field and
could hardly replace the drum. Besides, mankind had already
commenced to think on a higher plane, and the pipe was reduced
to filling what gaps it could in the language of the emotions.
The second strongest emotion of the race is love. All over the
world, wherever we find the pipe in its softer, earlier form, we
find it connected with love songs. In time it degenerated into
a synonym for something contemptibly slothful and worthless,
so much so that Plato wished to banish it from his "Republic,"
saying that the Lydian pipe should not have a place in a
decent community.
On the other hand, the trumpet branch of the family developed
into something quite different. At the very beginning it was
used for war, and as its object was to frighten, it became
larger and larger in form, and more formidable in sound. In
this respect it only kept pace with the drum, for we read
of Assyrian and Thibetan trumpets two or three yards long,
and of the Aztec war drum which reached the enormous height
of ten feet, and could be heard for miles.
Now this, the trumpet species of pipe, we find also used as an
auxiliary "spiritual" help to the drum. We are told by M. Huc,
in his "Travels in Thibet," that the llamas of Thibet have
a custom of assembling on the roofs of Lhassa at a stated
period and blowing enormous trumpets, making the most hideous
midnight din imaginable. The reason given for this was that
in former days the city was terrorized by demons who rose from
a deep ravine and crept through all the houses, working evil
everywhere. After the priests had exorcised them by blowing
these trumpets, the town was troubled no more. In Africa the
same demonstration of trumpet blowing occurs at an eclipse
of the moon; and, to draw the theory out to a thin thread,
anyone who has lived in a small German Protestant town will
remember the chorals which are so often played before sunrise
by a band of trumpets, horns, and trombones from the belfry of
some church tower. Almost up to the end of the last century
trombones were intimately connected with the church service;
and if we look back to Zoroaster we find the sacerdotal
character of this species of instrument very plainly indicated.
Now let us turn back to the Pan's pipes and its direct
descendants, the flute, the clarinet, and the oboe. We shall
find that they had no connection whatever with religious
observances. Even in the nineteenth century novel we are
familiar with the kind of hero who played the flute--a very
sentimental gentleman always in love. If he had played the
clarinet he would have been very sorrowful and discouraged; and
if it had been the oboe (which, to the best of my knowledge,
has never been attempted in fiction) he would have needed to
be a very ill man indeed.
Now we never hear of these latter kinds of pipes being
considered fit for anything but the dance, love songs, or love
charms. In the beginning of the seventeenth century Garcilaso
de la Vega, the historian of Peru, tells of the astonishing
power of a love song played on a flute. We find so-called
"courting" flutes in Formosa and Peru, and Catlin tells of the
Winnebago courting flute. The same instrument was known in Java,
as the old Dutch settlers have told us. But we never hear of it
as creating awe, or as being thought a fit instrument to use
with the drum or trumpet in connection with religious rites.
Leonardo da Vinci had a flute player make music while he
painted his picture of Mona Lisa, thinking that it gave her the
expression he wished to catch--that strange smile reproduced
in the Louvre painting. The flute member of the pipe species,
therefore, was more or less an emblem of eroticism, and, as I
have already said, has never been even remotely identified with
religious mysticism, with perhaps the one exception of Indra's
flute, which, however, never seems to have been able to retain a
place among religious symbols. The trumpet, on the other hand,
has retained something of a mystical character even to our
day. The most powerful illustration of this known to me is
in the "Requiem" by Berlioz. The effect of those tremendous
trumpet calls from the four corners of the orchestra is an
overwhelming one, of crushing power and majesty, much of which
is due to the rhythm.
To sum up. We may regard rhythm as the intellectual side
of music, melody as its sensuous side. The pipe is the one
instrument that seems to affect animals--hooded cobras,
lizards, fish, etc. Animals' natures are purely sensuous,
therefore the pipe, or to put it more broadly, melody, affects
them. To rhythm, on the other hand, they are indifferent;
it appeals to the intellect, and therefore only to man.
This theory would certainly account for much of the
potency of what we moderns call music. All that aims to be
dramatic, tragic, supernatural in our modern music, derives
its impressiveness directly from rhythm.[01] What would
that shudder of horror in Weber's "Freischuetz" be without
that throb of the basses? Merely a diminished chord of the
seventh. Add the pizzicato in the basses and the chord sinks
into something fearsome; one has a sudden choking sensation,
as if one were listening in fear, or as if the heart had
almost stopped beating. All through Wagner's music dramas
this powerful effect is employed, from "The Flying Dutchman"
to "Parsifal." Every composer from Beethoven to Nicode has
used the same means to express the same emotions; it is the
medium that pre-historic man first knew; it produced the same
sensation of fear in him that it does in us at the present day.
Rhythm denotes a thought; it is the expression of a
purpose. There is will behind it; its vital part is intention,
power; it is an act. Melody, on the other hand, is an almost
unconscious expression of the senses; it translates feeling
into sound. It is the natural outlet for sensation. In anger
we raise the voice; in sadness we lower it. In talking we
give expression to the emotions in sound. In a sentence in
which fury alternates with sorrow, we have the limits of the
melody of speech. Add to this rhythm, and the very height of
expression is reached; for by it the intellect will dominate
the sensuous.
[01] The strength of the "Fate" motive in Beethoven's fifth
symphony undoubtedly lies in the succession of the four
notes at equal intervals of time. Beethoven himself
marked it _So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte_.