Emerson characterized language as "fossil poetry," but "fossil
music" would have described it even better; for as Darwin says,
man _sang_ before he became human.
Gerber, in his "Sprache als Kunst," describing the degeneration
of sound symbols, says "the saving point of language is
that the original material meanings of words have become
forgotten or lost in their acquired ideal meaning." This
applies with special force to the languages of China, Egypt,
and India. Up to the last two centuries our written music
was held in bondage, was "fossil music," so to speak. Only
certain progressions of sounds were allowed, for religion
controlled music. In the Middle Ages folk song was used by
the Church, and a certain amount of control was exercised
over it; even up to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
the use of sharps and flats was frowned upon in church music.
But gradually music began to break loose from its old chains,
and in our own century we see Beethoven snap the last thread
of that powerful restraint which had held it so long.
The vital germ of music, as we know it, lay in the fact that
it had always found a home in the hearts of the common people
of all nations. While from time immemorial theory, mostly in
the form of mathematical problems, was being fought over, and
while laws were being laid down by religions and governments
of all nations as to what music must be and what music was
forbidden to be, the vital spark of the divine art was being
kept alive deep beneath the ashes of life in the hearts of the
oppressed common folk. They still sang as they felt; when the
mood was sad the song mirrored the sorrow; if it were gay the
song echoed it, despite the disputes of philosophers and the
commands of governments and religion. Montaigne, in speaking
of language, said with truth, "'Tis folly to attempt to fight
custom with theories." This folk song, to use a Germanism,
we can hardly take into account at the present moment, though
later we shall see that spark fanned into fire by Beethoven,
and carried by Richard Wagner as a flaming torch through the
very home of the gods, "Walhalla."
Let us go back to our dust heap. Words have been called
"decayed sentences," that is to say, every word was once a
small sentence complete in itself. This theory seems true
enough when we remember that mankind has three languages,
each complementing the other. For even now we say many words
in one, when that word is reinforced and completed by our
vocabulary of sounds and expression, which, in turn, has its
shadow, gesture. These shadow languages, which accompany
all our words, give to the latter vitality and raise them
from mere abstract symbols to living representatives of
the idea. Indeed, in certain languages, this auxiliary
expression even overshadows the spoken word. For instance,
in Chinese, the _theng_ or intonation of words is much more
important than the actual words themselves. Thus the third
intonation or _theng_, as it is called in the Pekin dialect,
is an upward inflection of the voice. A word with this upward
inflection would be unintelligible if given the fourth _theng_
or downward inflection. For instance, the word "kwai" with a
downward inflection means "honourable," but give it an upward
inflection "kwai" and it means "devil."
Just as a word was originally a sentence, so was a tone in
music something of a melody. One of the first things that
impresses us in studying examples of savage music is the
monotonic nature of the melodies; indeed some of the music
consists almost entirely of one oft-repeated sound. Those
who have heard this music say that the actual effect is not
one of a steady repetition of a single tone, but rather that
there seems to be an almost imperceptible rising and falling
of the voice. The primitive savage is unable to sing a tone
clearly and cleanly, the pitch invariably wavering. From
this almost imperceptible rising and falling of the voice
above and below one tone we are able to gauge more or less the
state of civilization of the nation to which the song belongs.
This phrase-tone corresponds, therefore, to the sentence-word,
and like it, gradually loses its meaning as a phrase and fades
into a tone which, in turn, will be used in new phrases as
mankind mounts the ladder of civilization.
At last then we have a single tone clearly uttered, and
recognizable as a musical tone. We can even make a plausible
guess as to what that tone was. Gardiner, in his "Music of
Nature," tells of experiments he made in order to determine the
normal pitch of the human voice. By going often to the gallery
of the London Stock Exchange he found that the roar of voices
invariably amalgamated into one long note, which was always
F. If we look over the various examples of monotonic savage
music quoted by Fletcher, Fillmore, Baker, Wilkes, Catlin,
and others, we find additional corroboration of the statement;
song after song, it will be noticed, is composed entirely of
F, G, and even F alone or G alone. Such songs are generally
ancient ones, and have been crystallized and held intact by
religion, in much the same way that the chanting heard in the
Roman Catholic service has been preserved.
Let us assume then that the normal tone of the human voice
in speaking is F or G [F: f g] for men, and for women the
octave higher. This tone does very well for our everyday life;
perhaps a pleasant impression may raise it somewhat, _ennui_ may
depress it slightly; but the average tone of our "commonplace"
talk, if I may call it that, will be about F. But let some
sudden emotion come, and we find monotone speech abandoned for
impassioned speech, as it has been called. Instead of keeping
the voice evenly on one or two notes, we speak much higher or
lower than our normal pitch.
And these sounds may be measured and classified to a certain
extent according to the emotions which cause them, although
it must be borne in mind that we are looking at the matter
collectively; that is to say, without reckoning on individual
idiosyncrasies of expression in speech. Of course we know that
joy is apt to make us raise the voice and sadness to lower
it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories, and
have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A
ghost story told with an upward inflection might easily
become humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upward
inflection with a non-pessimistic trend of thought. Under stress
of emotion we emphasize words strongly, and with this emphasis
we almost invariably raise the voice a fifth or depress it a
fifth; with yet stronger emotion the interval of change will
be an octave. We raise the voice almost to a scream or drop it
to a whisper. Strangely enough these primitive notes of music
correspond to the first two of those harmonics which are part
and parcel of every musical sound. Generally speaking, we may
say that the ascending inflection carries something of joy
or hope with it, while the downward inflection has something
of the sinister and fearful. To be sure, we raise our voices
in anger and in pain, but even then the inflection is almost
always downward; in other words, we pitch our voices higher and
let them fall slightly. For instance, if we heard a person cry
"Ah/" we might doubt its being a cry of pain, but if it were
"Ah\" we should at once know that it was caused by pain,
either mental or physical.
The declamation at the end of Schubert's "Erlking" would have
been absolutely false if the penultimate note had ascended to
the tonic instead of descending a fifth. "The child lay dead."
How fatally hopeless would be the opening measures of "Tristan
and Isolde" without that upward inflection which comes like a
sunbeam through a rift in the cloud; with a downward inflection
the effect would be that of unrelieved gloom. In the Prelude to
"Lohengrin," Wagner pictures his angels in dazzling white. He
uses the highest vibrating sounds at his command. But for
the dwarfs who live in the gloom of Niebelheim he chooses
deep shades of red, the lowest vibrating colour of the solar
spectrum. For it is in the nature of the spiritual part
of mankind to shrink from the earth, to aspire to something
higher; a bird soaring in the blue above us has something of
the ethereal; we give wings to our angels. On the other hand,
a serpent impresses us as something sinister. Trees, with
their strange fight against all the laws of gravity, striving
upward unceasingly, bring us something of hope and faith; the
sight of them cheers us. A land without trees is depressing and
gloomy. As Ruskin says, "The sea wave, with all its beneficence,
is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue
mountain is lifted towards Heaven in a stillness of perpetual
mercy; and while the one surges unfathomable in its darkness,
the other is unshaken in its faithfulness."
And yet so strange is human nature that that which we
call civilization strives unceasingly to nullify emotion.
The almost childlike faith which made our church spires
point heavenward also gave us Gothic architecture, that
emblem of frail humanity striving towards the ideal. It is
a long leap from that childlike faith to the present day of
skyscrapers. For so is the world constituted. A great truth
too often becomes gradually a truism, then a merely tolerated
and uninteresting theory; gradually it becomes obsolete
and sometimes even degenerates into a symbol of sarcasm or a
servant of utilitarianism. This we are illustrating every day
of our lives. We speak of a person's being "silly," and yet
the word comes from "saelig," old English for "blessed"; to act
"sheepishly" once had reference to divine resignation, "even
as a sheep led to the slaughter," and so on _ad infinitum_.
We build but few great cathedrals now. Our tall buildings
generally point to utilitarianism and the almighty dollar.
But in the new art, music, we have found a new domain in which
impulses have retained their freshness and warmth, in which,
to quote Goethe, "first comes the act, then the word"; first
the expression of emotion, then the theory that classifies it;
a domain in which words cannot lose their original meanings
entirely, as in speech. For in spite of the strange twistings
of ultra modern music, a simple melody still embodies the
same pathos for us that it did for our grandparents. To be
sure the poignancy of harmony in our day has been heightened
to an incredible degree. We deal in gorgeous colouring and
mighty sound masses which would have been amazing in the last
century; but still through it all we find in Haendel, Beethoven,
and Schubert, up to Wagner, the same great truths of declamation
that I have tried to explain to you.
Herbert Spencer, in an essay on "The Origin and Functions of
Music," speaks of speech as the parent of music. He says,
"utterance, which when languaged is speech, gave rise to
music." The definition is incomplete, for "languaged utterance,"
as he calls it, which is speech, is a duality, is either an
expression of emotion or a mere symbol of emotion, and as such
has gradually sunk to the level of the commonplace. As Rowbotham
points out, impassioned speech is the parent of music, while
unimpassioned speech has remained the vehicle for the smaller
emotions of life, the everyday expression of everyday emotions.
In studying the music of different nations we are confronted
by one fact which seems to be part and parcel of almost every
nationality, namely, the constant recurrence of what is called
the five tone (pentatonic) scale. We find it in primitive
forms of music all the world over, in China and in Scotland,
among the Burmese, and again in North America. Why it is so
seems almost doomed to remain a mystery. The following theory
may nevertheless be advanced as being at least plausible:
Vocal music, as we understand it, and as I have already
explained, began when the first tone could be given clearly;
that is to say, when the sound sentence had amalgamated into the
single musical tone. The pitch being sometimes F, sometimes G,
sudden emotion gives us the fifth, C or D, and the strongest
emotion the octave, F or G. Thus we have already the following
sounds in our first musical scale.
[G: f' g' c'' d'' f'']
We know how singers slur from one tone to another. It is a
fault that caused the fathers of harmony to prohibit what
are called hidden fifths in vocal music. The jump from G to
C in the above scale fragment would be slurred, for we must
remember that the intoning of clear individual sounds was
still a novelty to the savage. Now the distance from G to
C is too small to admit two tones such as the savage knew;
consequently, for the sake of uniformity, he would try to
put but one tone between, singing a mixture of A and B[flat],
which sound in time fell definitely to A, leaving the mystery
of the half-tone unsolved. This addition of the third would
thus fall in with the law of harmonics again. First we have the
keynote; next in importance comes the fifth; and last of all
the third. Thus again is the absence of the major seventh in
our primitive scale perfectly logical; we may search in vain
in our list of harmonics for the tone which forms that interval.
Now that we have traced the influence of passionate utterance
on music, it still remains for us to consider the influence
of something very different. The dance played an important
role in the shaping of the art of music; for to it music owes
periodicity, form, the shaping of phrases into measures,
even its rests. And in this music is not the only debtor,
for poetry owes its very "feet" to the dance.
Now the dance was, and is, an irresponsible thing. It had no
_raison d'etre_ except purely physical enjoyment. This rhythmic
swaying of the body and light tapping of the feet have always
had a mysterious attraction and fascination for mankind,
and music and poetry were caught in its swaying measures
early in the dawn of art. When a man walks, he takes either
long steps or short steps, he walks fast or slow. But when
he takes one long step and one short one, when one step is
slow and the other fast, he no longer walks, he dances. Thus
we may say with reasonable certainty that triple time arose
directly from the dance, for triple time is simply one strong,
long beat followed by a short, light one, viz.: [2 4] or
[- '], the "trochee" in our poetry. [4 2] [' -], Iambic.
The spondee [2 2] or [- -], which is the rhythm of prose,
we already possessed; for when we walk it is in spondees,
namely, in groups of two equal steps. Now imagine dancing
to spondees! At first the steps will be equal, but the body
rests on the first beat; little by little the second beat,
being thus relegated to a position of relative unimportance,
becomes shorter and shorter, and we rest longer on the first
beat. The result is the trochaic rhythm. We can see that this
result is inevitable, even if only the question of physical
fatigue is considered. And, to carry on our theory, this very
question of fatigue still further develops rhythm. The strong
beat always coming on one foot, and the light beat on the other,
would soon tire the dancer; therefore some way must be found
to make the strong beat alternate from one foot to the other.
The simplest, and in fact almost the only way to do this,
is to insert an additional short beat before the light beat.
This gives us [- ' -] or [4. 8 4], the dactyl in poetry.
We have, moreover, here discovered the beginning of form, and
have begun to group our musical tones in measures and phrases;
for our second dactyl is slightly different from the first,
because the right foot begins the first and the left foot the
second. We have two measures [(4. 8 4 | 4. 8 4)]
[(- ' - | - ' -)]
and one phrase, for after the second measure the right foot
will again have the beat and will begin another phrase of two
measures.
Carry this theory still further, and we shall make new
discoveries. If we dance in the open air, unless we would dance
over the horizon, we must turn somewhere; and if we have but a
small space in which to dance, the turns must come sooner and
oftener. Even if we danced in a circle we should need to reverse
the motion occasionally, in order to avoid giddiness; and this
would measure off our phrases into periods and sections.
Thus we see music dividing into two classes, one purely
emotional, the other sensuous; the one arising from the language
of heroes, the other from the swaying of the body and the patter
of feet. To both of these elements, if we may call them so,
metre and melody brought their power; to declamation, metre
brought its potent vitality; to the dance, melody added its soft
charm and lulling rhyme. The intellectual in music, namely,
rhythm and declamation, thus joined forces, as did the purely
sensuous elements, melody and metre (dance). At the first glance
it would seem as if the dance with its rhythms contradicted the
theory of rhythm as being one of the two vital factors in music;
but when we consider the fact that dance-rhythms are merely
regular pulsations (once commenced they pulsate regularly to
the end, without break or change), and when we consider that
just this unbroken regularity is the very antithesis of what
we mean by rhythm, the purely sensuous nature of the dance is
manifest. Strauss was the first to recognize this defect in
the waltz, and he remedied it, so far as it lay within human
skill, by a marvellous use of counter-rhythms, thus infusing
into the dance a simulation of intellectuality.
The weaving together of these elements into one art-fabric has
been the ideal of all poets from Homer to Wagner. The Greeks
idealized their dances; that is to say, they made their dances
fit their declamation. In the last two centuries, and especially
in the middle of the nineteenth, we have danced our highest
flights of impassioned speech. For what is the symphony, sonata,
etc., but a remnant of the dance form? The choric dances of
Stesichorus and Pindar came strangely near our modern forms,
but it was because the form fitted the poem. In our modern
days, we too often, Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the
forms. We put our guest, the poetic thought, that comes to us
like a homing bird from out the mystery of the blue sky--we
put this confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed,
the "sonata form," or perhaps even the third rondo form,
for we have quite an assortment. Should the idea survive
and grow too large for the bed, and if we have learned to
love it too much to cut off its feet and thus _make_ it fit
(as did that old robber of Attica), why we run the risk of
having some critic wise in his theoretical knowledge, say,
as was and is said of Chopin, "He is weak in sonata form!"
There are two ways of looking at music: first, as impassioned
speech, the nearest psychologically-complete utterance of
emotion known to man; second, as the dance, comprising as it
does all that appeals to our nature. And there is much that is
lovely in this idea of nature--for do not the seasons dance,
and is it not in that ancient measure we have already spoken of,
the trochaic? Long Winter comes with heavy foot, and Spring is
the light-footed. Again, Summer is long, and Autumn short and
cheery; and so our phrase begins again and again. We all know
with what periodicity everything in nature dances, and how the
smallest flower is a marvel of recurring rhymes and rhythms,
with perfume for a melody. How Shakespeare's Beatrice charms us
when she says, "There a star danced, and under that was I born."
And yet man is not part of Nature. Even in the depths of the
primeval forest, that poor savage, whom we found listening
fearfully to the sound of his drum, knew better. Mankind lives
in isolation, and Nature is a thing for him to conquer. For
Nature is a thing that exists, while man _thinks_. Nature is
that which passively lives while man actively wills. It is the
strain of Nature in man that gave him the dance, and it is his
godlike fight against Nature that gave him impassioned speech;
beauty of form and motion on one side, all that is divine in man
on the other; on one side materialism, on the other idealism.
We have traced the origin of the drum, pipe, and the voice in
music. It still remains for us to speak of the lyre and the
lute, the ancestors of our modern stringed instruments. The
relative antiquity of the lyre and the lute as compared with
the harp has been much discussed, the main contention against
the lyre being that it is a more artificial instrument than
the harp; the harp was played with the fingers alone, while the
lyre was played with a plectrum (a small piece of metal, wood,
or ivory). Perhaps it would be safer to take the lute as the
earliest form of the stringed instrument, for, from the very
first, we find two species of instruments with strings, one
played with the fingers, the prototype of our modern harps,
banjos, guitars, etc., the other played with the plectrum,
the ancestor of all our modern stringed instruments played by
means of bows and hammers, such as violins, pianos, etc.
However this may be, one thing is certain, the possession of
these instruments implies already a considerable measure of
culture, for they were not haphazard things. They were made for
a purpose, were invented to fill a gap in the ever-increasing
needs of expression. In Homer we find a description of the
making of a lyre by Hermes, how this making of a lyre from the
shell of a tortoise that happened to pass before the entrance to
the grotto of his mother, Maia, was his first exploit; and that
he made it to accompany his song in praise of his father Zeus.
We must accept this explanation of the origin of the lyre,
namely, that it was deliberately invented to accompany the
voice. For the lyre in its primitive state was never a solo
instrument; the tone was weak and its powers of expression
were exceedingly limited. On the other hand, it furnished an
excellent background for the voice and, which was still more
to the point, the singer could accompany himself. The drum
had too vague a pitch, and the flute or pipe necessitated
another performer, besides having too much similarity of tone
to the voice to give sufficient contrast. Granted then that the
lyre was invented to accompany the voice, and without wasting
time with surmises as to whether the first idea of stringed
instruments was received from the twanging of a bowstring
or the finding of a tortoise shell with the half-dessicated
tendons of the animal still stretching across it, let us find
when the instrument was seemingly first used.
That the lyre and lute are of Asiatic origin is generally
conceded, and even in comparatively modern times, Asia seems to
be the home of its descendants. The Tartars have been called
the troubadours of Asia--and of Asia in the widest sense of
the word--penetrating into the heart of the Caucasus on the
west and reaching through the country eastward to the shores of
the Yellow Sea. Marco Polo, the celebrated Venetian traveller,
and M. Huc, a French missionary to China and Thibet, as well
as Spencer, Atkinson, and many others, speak of the wandering
bards of Asia. Marco Polo's account of how Jenghiz Kahn, the
great Mongol conqueror, sent an expedition composed entirely of
minstrels against Mien, a city of 30,000 inhabitants, has often
been quoted to show what an abundance--or perhaps superfluity
would be the better word--of musicians he had at his court.
That the lyre could not be of Greek origin is proved by the fact
that no root has been discovered in the language for _lyra_,
although there are many special names for varieties of the
instrument. Leaving aside the question of the geographical
origin of the instrument, we may say, broadly, that wherever
we find a nation with even the smallest approach to a history,
there we shall find bards singing of the exploits of heroes,
and always to the accompaniment of the lyre or the lute. For at
last, by means of these instruments, impassioned speech was able
to lift itself permanently above the level of everyday life,
and its lofty song could dispense with the soft, sensuous
lull of the flute. And we shall see later how these bards
became seers, and how even our very angels received harps,
so closely did the instrument become associated with what I
have called impassioned speech, which, in other words, is the
highest expression of what we consider godlike in man.