[G: (a a+ b c' c+' d') (a' a+' b' c'' c+'' d'') (e'')
f'' f+'' g'' g+'' (a'' a+'' b'' c''' c+''' d''')]
The only thing about which we may be reasonably certain in
regard to Egyptian music is that, like Egyptian architecture,
it must have been very massive, on account of the preponderance
in the orchestra of the low tones of the stringed instruments.
The sistrum was, properly speaking, not considered a musical
instrument at all. It was used only in religious ceremonies, and
may be considered as the ancestor of the bell that is rung at
the elevation of the Host in Roman Catholic churches. Herodotus
(born 485 B.C.) tells us much about Egyptian music, how the
great festival at Bubastis in honour of the Egyptian Diana
(_Bast_ or _Pascht_), to whom the cat was sacred, was attended
yearly by 700,000 people who came by water, the boats resounding
with the clatter of castanets, the clapping of hands, and the
soft tones of thousands of flutes. Again he tells us of music
played during banquets, and speaks of a mournful song called
_Maneros_. This, the oldest song of the Egyptians (dating back
to the first dynasty), was symbolical of the passing away of
life, and was sung in connection with that gruesome custom
of bringing in, towards the end of a banquet, an effigy of a
corpse to remind the guests that death is the birthright of
all mankind, a custom which was adopted later by the Romans.
Herodotus also gives us a vague but very suggestive glimpse
of what may have been the genesis of Greek tragedy, for he was
permitted to see a kind of nocturnal Egyptian passion play, in
which evidently the tragedy of Osiris was enacted with ghastly
realism. Osiris, who represents the light, is hunted by Set or
Typhon, the god of darkness, and finally torn to pieces by the
followers of Set, and buried beneath the waters of the lake;
Horus, the son of Osiris, avenges his death by subduing Set, and
Osiris appears again as the ruler of the shadowland of death.
This strange tragedy took place at night, on the shore of
the lake behind the great temple at Sais. Osiris was dressed
royally, in white, and after the horrible pursuit and his
murder by Set and his sinister band, Horus, the rising sun,
dispels the gloom, and a glorious new god of light appears. Set
and his followers are driven back to the gloomy temple where,
perhaps, there was another scene showing the shade of Osiris,
enthroned and ruling the dead. We have no means of knowing the
character of the music which accompanied this mystery play;
but certainly the deep tones of the harps and the flutes,
together with the chanting of men's voices, must have been
appropriate. Add to these the almost silent rattle of the
sistrum, which, for the Egyptians, possessed something of the
supernatural, and we have an orchestral colouring which is
suggestive, to say the least.
With this we will leave Egyptian music, simply calling attention
to the works of Resellini, Lepsius, Wilkinson, and Petri,
which contain copies of mural paintings and temple and tomb
sculptures relating to music. For instance, pages 103, 106, and
111 of Lepsius's third book, "Die Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und
Aethiopen," will be found very interesting, particularly page
106, which shows some of the rooms of the palace of Amenotep
IV, of the eighteenth dynasty (about 1500 or 1600 B.C.),
in which dancing and music is being taught. In the same work,
second book, on pages 52 and 53, are pictures taken from a tomb
near Gizeh, showing harp and flute players and singers. The
position of the hands of the singers--they hold them behind
their ears--is a manner of illustrating the act of hearing,
and arises from the hieroglyphic _double_ way of putting things;
for instance, in writing hieroglyphics the word is often first
spelled out, then comes another sign for the pronunciation,
then sometimes even two other signs to emphasize its meaning.
The music of the Assyrians may be summed up very briefly. All
that can be gathered from the bas-relief sculptures is that
shrill tones and acute pitch must have characterized their
music. As Rowbotham says, alluding to the Sardanapalus wall
sculpture now in the British Museum in London, "What can one
think of the musical delicacy of a nation the King of which,
dining alone with his queen, chooses to be regaled with the
sounds of a lyre and a big drum close at his elbow?" The
instruments represented in these bas-reliefs, aside from the
drum, are high-pitched: flutes, pipes, trumpets, cymbals, and
the smaller stringed instruments. These were all portable,
and some, such as drums and dulcimers, were strapped to the
body, all of which points to the eminently warlike character
of the people. Instead of clapping the hands to mark the time
as did the Egyptians, they stamped their feet. The dulcimer
was somewhat like a modern zither, and may be said to contain
the germ of our piano; for it was in the form of a flat case,
strapped to the body and held horizontally in front of the
player. The strings were struck with a kind of plectrum,
held in the right hand, and were touched with the left hand
immediately afterwards to stop the vibration, just as the
dampers in the pianoforte fall on the string the moment the
key is released. There existed among the Chaldeans a science
of music, which, of course, is a very different thing from
practical music, but it was so imbued with astronomical
symbolism that it seems hardly worth while to consider
it here. The art of Babylonia and Assyria culminated in
architecture and bas-relief sculpture, and it is chiefly
valuable as being the germ from which Greek art was developed.
In considering Chinese music one has somewhat the same feeling
as one would have in looking across a flat plain. There are no
mountains in Chinese music, and there is nothing in its history
to make us think that it was ever anything but a more or less
puerile playing with sound; therefore there is no separating
modern Chinese music from that of antiquity. To be sure,
Confucius (about 500 B.C.) said that to be well governed
a nation must possess good music. Pythagoras, Aristotle,
and Plato, in Greece, said the same thing, and their maxims
proved a very important factor in the music of ancient times,
for the simple reason that an art controlled by government can
have nothing very vital about it. Hebrew music was utterly
annihilated by laws, and the poetic imagination thus pent
up found its vent in poetry, the result being some of the
most wonderful works the world has ever known. In Egypt, this
current of inspiration from the very beginning was turned toward
architecture. In Greece, music became a mere stage accessory
or a subject for the dissecting table of mathematics; in China,
we have the dead level of an obstinate adherence to tradition,
thus proving Sir Thomas Browne's saying, "The mortallest enemy
unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution
upon truth, hath been a peremptory adhesion unto tradition,
and more especially the establishing of our own belief upon
the dictates of antiquity."
The Chinese theory is that there are eight different musical
sounds in nature, namely:
1. The sound of skin.
2. The sound of stone.
3. The sound of metal.
4. The sound of clay.
5. The sound of silk.
6. The sound of wood.
7. The sound of bamboo.
8. The sound of gourd.
The sound of skin has a number of varieties, all different
kinds of drums.
The sound of stone is held by the Chinese to be the most
beautiful among sounds, one between that of metal and of
wood. The principal instrument in this category is the _king_,
and in mythology it is the chosen instrument of Kouei, the
Chinese Orpheus. This instrument has a large framework on which
are hung sixteen stones of different sizes, which are struck,
like drums, with a kind of hammer. According to Amiot, only
a certain kind of stone found near the banks of the river
Tee will serve for the making of these instruments, and in
the year 2200 B.C. the Emperor Yu assessed the different
provinces so many stones each for the palace instruments,
in place of tribute.
The sound of metal is embodied in the various kinds of bells,
which are arranged in many different series, sometimes after
the patterns of the _king_, while sometimes they are played
separately.
The sound of clay, or baked earth, is given by a kind of round
egg made of porcelain--for that is what it amounts to--pierced
with five holes and a mouthpiece, upon blowing through which
the sound is produced--an instrument somewhat suggestive of
our ocarina.
The sound of silk is given by two instruments: one a kind of
flat harp with seven strings, called _che_, the other with
twenty-five strings, called _kin_, in size from seven to nine
feet long. The ancient form of this instrument is said to have
had fifty strings.
The sound of wood is a strange element in a Chinese orchestra,
for it is produced in three different ways: first, by an
instrument in the form of a square wooden box with a hole in one
of its sides through which the hand, holding a small mallet,
is inserted, the sound of wood being produced by hammering
with the mallet on the inside walls of the box, just as the
clapper strikes a bell. This box is placed at the northeast
corner of the orchestra, and begins every piece. Second, by a
set of strips of wood strung on a strap or cord, the sound of
which is obtained by beating the palm of the hand with them.
The third is the strangest of all, for the instrument consists
of a life-size wooden tiger. It has a number of teeth or pegs
along the ridge of its back, and it is "played" by stroking
these pegs rapidly with a wooden staff, and then striking the
tiger on the head. This is the prescribed end of every Chinese
orchestral composition, and is supposed to be a symbol of man's
supremacy over brute creation. The tiger has its place in the
northwest corner of the orchestra.
The sound of bamboo is represented in the familiar form of
Pan's pipes, and various forms of flutes which hardly need
further description.
And finally the sound of the gourd. The gourd is a kind of
squash, hollowed out, in which from thirteen to twenty-four
pipes of bamboo or metal are inserted; each one of these
pipes contains a metal reed, the vibration of which causes
the sound. Below the reed are cut small holes in the pipes,
and there is a pipe with a mouthpiece to keep the gourd,
which is practically an air reservoir, full of air. The air
rushing out through the bamboo pipes will naturally escape
through the holes cut below the reeds, making no sound, but
if the finger stops one or more of these holes, the air is
forced up through the reeds, thus giving a musical sound,
the pitch of which will be dependent on the length of the
pipes and the force with which the air passes through the reed.
Other instruments of the Chinese are gongs of all sizes,
trumpets, and several stringed instruments somewhat akin to our
guitars and mandolins. Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese
have ever seemed to consider the voice as partaking of the
nature of music. This is strange, for the language of the
Chinese depends on flexibility of the voice to make it even
intelligible. As a matter of fact, singing, in our sense of
the word, is unknown to them.
V