Having described the musical instruments in use in China
we still have for consideration the music itself, and the
conditions which led up to it.
Among the Chinese instruments mentioned in the preceding
chapter, the preponderance of instruments of percussion, such
as drums, gongs, bells, etc., has probably been noticed. In
connection with the last named we meet with one of the two cases
in Chinese art in which we see the same undercurrent of feeling,
or rather superstition, as that found among western nations. We
read in the writings of Mencius, the Chinese philosopher (350
B.C.), the following bit of gossip about the king Senen of Tse.
"The king," said he, "was sitting aloft in the hall, when
a man appeared, leading an ox past the lower part of it.
The king saw him, and asked, 'Where is the ox going?'
"The man replied, 'We are going to consecrate a bell with
its blood.'
"The king said, 'Let it go. I cannot bear its frightened
appearance as if it were an innocent person going to the
place of death.'
"The man answered, 'Shall we then omit the consecration
of the bell?'
"The king said, 'How can that be omitted? Change the ox
for a sheep.'"
As stated before, this is one of the few cases in which Chinese
superstition coincides with that of the West; for our own church
bells were once consecrated in very much the same manner, a
survival of that ancient universal custom of sacrifice. With
the exception of this resemblance, which, however, has nothing
to do with actual music, everything in Chinese art is exactly
the opposite of our western ideas on the subject.
The Chinese orchestra is composed of about sixteen different
types of percussion instruments and four kinds of wind and
stringed instruments, whereas in our European orchestras the
ratio is exactly reversed. Their orchestras are placed at
the back of the stage, ours in front of it. The human voice
is not even mentioned in their list of musical sounds (sound
of metal, baked clay, wood, skin, bamboo, etc)., whereas we
consider it the most nearly perfect instrument existing. This
strange perversity once caused much discussion in days when
we knew less of China than we do at present, as to whether
the Chinese organs of hearing were not entirely different from
those of western nations. We now know that this contradiction
runs through all their habits of life. With them white is the
colour indicative of mourning; the place of honour is on the
left hand; the seat of intellect is in the stomach; to take off
one's hat is considered an insolent gesture; the magnetic needle
of the Chinese compass is reckoned as pointing south, instead of
north; even up to the middle of the nineteenth century the chief
weapon in war was the bow and arrow, although they were long
before acquainted with gunpowder--and so on, _ad infinitum_.
We are aware that the drum is the most primitive instrument
known to man. If all our knowledge of the Chinese were included
in a simple list of their orchestral instruments, we should
recognize at once that the possession of the gourd, mouth-organ,
and lute indicates a nation which has reached a high state of
civilization; on the other hand, the great preponderance of
bells, gongs, drums, etc., points unmistakably to the fact
that veneration of the laws and traditions of the past (a
past of savage barbarism), and a blind acquiescence in them,
must constitute the principal factor in that civilization. The
writings of Chinese philosophers are full of wise sayings
about music, but in practice the music itself becomes almost
unbearable. For instance, in the Confucian _Analects_ we read,
"The Master (Confucius)[02] said: 'How to play music may be
known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should
sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony,
severally distinct, and flowing without a break, and thus on
to the conclusion.'" The definition is certainly remarkable
when one considers that it was given about five hundred
years before our era. In practice, however, the Chinese do
not distinguish between musical _combinations_ of sound and
_noise_; therefore the above definition must be taken in a very
different sense from that which ordinarily would be the case. By
harmony, Confucius evidently means similarity of noises, and by
"melody flowing without a break" he means absolute monotony of
rhythm. We know this from the hymns to the ancestors which,
with the hymns to the Deity, are the sacred songs of China,
songs which have come down from time immemorial.
According to Amiot one of the great court functions is the
singing of the "Hymn to the Ancestors," which is conducted
by the Emperor. Outside the hall where this ceremony takes
place are stationed a number of bell and gong players who
may not enter, but who, from time to time, according to fixed
laws, join in the music played and sung inside. In the hall
the orchestra is arranged in the order prescribed by law:
the _ou_, or wooden tiger, which ends every piece, is placed
at the northwest end of the orchestra, and the _tschou_, or
wooden box-drum, which begins the music, at the northeast;
in the middle are placed the singers who accompany the hymn
by posturing as well as by chanting. At the back of the hall
are pictures of the ancestors, or merely tablets inscribed
with their names, before which is a kind of altar, bearing
flowers and offerings. The first verse of the hymn consists of
eight lines in praise of the godlike virtues of the ancestors,
whose spirits are supposed to descend from Heaven and enter
the hall during the singing of this verse by the chorus. Then
the Emperor prostrates himself three times before the altar,
touching his head to the earth each time. As he offers the
libations and burns the perfumes on the altar, the chorus
sings the second verse of eight lines, in which the spirits
are thanked for answering the prayer and entreated to accept
the offerings. The Emperor then prostrates himself nine times,
after which he resumes his position before the altar, while
the last verse of eight lines, eulogistic of the ancestors,
is being chanted; during this the spirits are supposed to
ascend again to Heaven. The hymn ends with the scraping of
the tiger's back and striking it on the head.
We can imagine the partial gloom of this species of chapel,
lighted by many burning, smoky joss-sticks, with its glint
of many-coloured silks, and gold embroidery; the whining,
nasal, half-spoken, monotonous drone of the singers with their
writhing figures bespangled with gold and vivid colour; the
incessant stream of shrill tones from the wind instruments;
the wavering, light clatter of the musical stones broken
by the steady crash of gongs and the deep booming of large
drums; while from outside, the most monstrous bell-like noises
vaguely penetrate the smoke-laden atmosphere. The ceremony
must be barbarously impressive; the strange magnificence of it
all, together with the belief in the actual presence of the
spirits, which the vague white wreaths of joss-stick smoke
help to suggest, seem to lend it dignity. From the point of
view of what we call music, the hymn is childish enough; but
we must keep in mind the definition of Confucius. According
to the Chinese, music includes that phase of sound which we
call mere noise, and the harmonizing of this noise is Chinese
art. We must admit, therefore, that from this point of view
their orchestra is well balanced, for what will rhyme better
with noise than more noise? The gong is best answered by the
drum, and the tomtom by the great bell.
China also has its folk song, which seems to be an irrepressible
flower of the field in all countries. This also follows the
precepts of the sages in using only the five-note or pentatonic
scale found among so many other nationalities. It differs,
however, from the official or religious music, inasmuch as
that unrhythmic perfection of monotony, so loved by Confucius,
Mencius, and their followers, is discarded in favour of a style
more naturally in touch with human emotion. These folk songs
have a strong similarity to Scotch and Irish songs, owing to
the absence of the fourth and seventh degrees of the scale.
If they were really sung to the accompaniment of chords, the
resemblance would be very striking. The Chinese singing voice,
however, is not sonorous, the quality commonly used being a
kind of high, nasal whine, very far removed from what we call
music. The accompaniment of the songs is of a character most
discordant to European ears, consisting as it does mainly of
constant drum or gong beats interspersed with the shrill notes
of the _kin_, the principal Chinese stringed instrument. Ambros,
the historian, quotes a number of these melodies, but falls
into a strange mistake, for his version of a folk song called
"_Tsin-fa_" is as follows:
[Figure 01]
Now this is exactly as if a Chinaman, wishing to give his
countrymen an idea of a Beethoven sonata, were to eliminate
all the harmony and leave only the bare melody accompanied by
indiscriminate beats on the gong and a steady banging on two or
three drums of different sizes. This is certainly the manner
in which the little melody just quoted would be accompanied,
and not by European chords and rhythms.
If we could eliminate from our minds all thoughts of music and
bring ourselves to listen only to the _texture_ of sounds, we
could better understand the Chinese ideal of musical art. For
instance, if in listening to the deep, slow vibrations of a
large gong we ignore completely all thought of pitch, fixing
our attention only upon the roundness and fullness of the sound
and the way it gradually diminishes in volume without losing
any of its pulsating colour, we should then realize what the
Chinese call music. Confucius said, "When the music master Che
first entered on his office, the finish with the _Kwan-Ts'eu_
(Pan's-pipes) was magnificent--how it filled the ears!" And
that is just what Chinese music aims to do, it "fills the ears"
and therefore is "magnificent."[03]
With their views as to what constitutes the beautiful in music
it is not strange that the Chinese find our music detestable. It
goes too fast for them. They ask, "Why play another entirely
different kind of sound until one has already enjoyed to
the full what has gone before?" As they told Pere Amiot
many years ago: "Our music penetrates through the ear to the
heart, and from the heart to the soul; that your music cannot
do." Amiot had played on a harpsichord some pieces by Rameau
("_Les Cyclopes_," "_Les Charmes_," etc.) and much flute music,
but they could make nothing of it.
According to their conception of music, sounds must follow one
another slowly, in order to pass through the ears to the heart
and thence to the soul; therefore they went back with renewed
satisfaction to their long, monotonous chant accompanied by
a pulsating fog of clangour.
Some years ago, at the time of that sudden desire of China,
or more particularly of Li Hung Chang, to know more of
occidental civilization, some Chinese students were sent
by their government to Berlin to study music. After about a
month's residence in Berlin these students wrote to the Chinese
government asking to be recalled, as they said it would be
folly to remain in a barbarous country where even the most
elementary principles of music had not yet been grasped.
To go deeply into the more technical side of Chinese music
would be a thankless task, for in the Chinese character
the practical is entirely overshadowed by the speculative.
All kinds of fanciful names are given to the different tones,
and many strange ideas associated with them. Although our modern
chromatic scale (all but the last half-tone) is familiar to
them, they have never risen to a practical use of it even to
this day. The Chinese scale is now, as it always has been,
one of five notes to the octave, that is to say, our modern
major scale with the fourth and seventh omitted.
From a technical point of view, the instruments of bamboo attain
an importance above all other Chinese instruments. According
to the legend, the Pan's-pipes of bamboo regulated the tuning
of all other instruments, and as a matter of fact the pipe
giving the note F, the universal tonic, is the origin of
all measures also. For this pipe, which in China is called
the "musical foot," is at the same time a standard measure,
holding exactly twelve hundred millet seeds, and long enough
for one hundred millet seeds to stand end on end within it.
In concluding this consideration of the music of the
Chinese, I would draw attention to the unceasing repetition
which constitutes a prominent feature in all barbarous or
semi-barbarous music. In the "Hymn of the Ancestors" this
endless play on three or four notes is very marked.
[Figure 02]
In other songs it is equally apparent.
[Figure 03] etc.
[Figure 04]
[Figure 05] etc.
This characteristic is met with in the music of the American
Indians, also in American street songs, in fact in all music of
a primitive nature, just as our school children draw caricatures
similar to those made by great chiefs and medicine men in the
heart of Africa, and, similarly, the celebrated "graffiti"
of the Roman soldiers were precisely of the same nature as
the beginnings of Egyptian art. In art, the child is always
a barbarian more or less, and all strong emotion acting on
a naturally weak organism or a primitive nature brings the
same result, namely, that of stubborn repetition of one idea.
An example of this is Macbeth, who, in the very height of his
passion, stops to juggle with the word "sleep," and in spite
of the efforts of his wife, who is by far the more civilized
of the two, again and again recurs to it, even though he
is in mortal danger. When Lady Macbeth at last breaks down,
she also shows the same trait in regard to her bloodstained
hands. It is not so far from Scotland to the Polar regions,
and there we find that when Kane captured a young Eskimo and
kept him on his ship, the only sign of life the prisoner gave
was to sing over and over to himself the following:
[Figure 06]
Coming back again to civilization, we find Tennyson's Elaine, in
her grief, repeating, incessantly the words, "Must I then die."
The music of the Siamese, Burmese, Javanese, and Japanese has
much in common with that of the Chinese, the difference between
the first two and the last named being mainly in the absence
of the _king_, or musical stones, or rather the substitution
of sets of drums in place of it. For instance, the Burmese
drum-organ, as it is called, consists of twenty-one drums
of various sizes hung inside a great hoop. Their gong-organ
consists of fifteen or more gongs of different sizes strung
inside a hoop in the same manner. The player takes his place
in the middle of the hoop and strikes the drums or gongs
with a kind of stick. These instruments are largely used in
processions, being carried by two men, just as a sedan chair is
borne; the player, in order to strike all the gongs and bells,
must often walk backwards, or strike them behind his back.
In Javanese and Burmese music these sets of gongs and drums are
used incessantly, and form a kind of high-pitched, sustained
tone beneath which the music is played or sung.
In Siamese music the wind instruments have a prominent
place. After having heard the Siamese Royal Orchestra a number
of times in London, I came to the conclusion that the players
on the different instruments _improvise_ their parts, the only
rule being the general character of the melodies to be played,
and the finishing together. The effect of the music was that
of a contrapuntal nightmare, hideous to a degree which one who
has not heard it cannot conceive. Berlioz, in his "Soirees de
l'orchestre," well described its effect when he said:
"After the first sensation of horror which one cannot
repress, one feels impelled to laugh, and this hilarity
can only be controlled by leaving the hall. So long
as these impossible sounds continue, the fact of their
being gravely produced, and in all sincerity _admired_
by the players, makes the 'concert' appear inexpressibly
'comic.'"
The Japanese had the same Buddhistic disregard for euphony,
but they have adopted European ideas in music and are rapidly
becoming occidentalized from a musical point of view. Their
principal instruments are the _koto_ and the _samisen_. The
former is similar to the Chinese _che_, and is a kind of large
zither with thirteen strings, each having a movable bridge by
means of which the pitch of the string may be raised or lowered.
The _samisen_ is a kind of small banjo, and probably originated
in the Chinese _kin_.
From Buddhism to sun worship, from China to Peru and Mexico,
is a marked change, but we find strange resemblances in the
music of these peoples, seeming almost to corroborate the
theory that the southern American races may be traced back to
the extreme Orient. We remember that in the Chinese sacred
chants--"official" music as one may call it--all the notes
were of exactly the same length. Now Garcilaso de la Vega
(1550), in his "Commentarios Reales," tells us that unequal
time was unknown in Peru, that all the notes in a song were
of exactly the same length. He further tells us that in his
time the voice was but seldom heard in singing, and that
all the songs were played on the flute, the words being so
well known that the melody of the flute immediately suggested
them. The Peruvians were essentially a pipe race, while, on the
other hand, the instruments of the Mexicans were of the other
extreme, all kinds of drums, copper gongs, rattles, musical
stones, cymbals, bells, etc., thus completing the resemblance
to Chinese art. In Prescott's "Conquest of Peru" we may read
of the beautiful festival of Raymi, or adoration of the sun,
held at the period of the summer solstice. It describes how the
Inca and his court, followed by the whole population of the
city, assembled at early dawn in the great square of Cuzco,
and how, at the appearance of the first rays of the sun,
a great shout would go up, and thousands of wind instruments
would break forth into a majestic song of adoration. That the
Peruvians were a gentler nation than the Mexicans can be seen
from their principal instrument, the pipe.
While it has been strenuously denied that on such occasions
human sacrifices were offered in Peru, the Mexicans, that race
whose principal instruments were drums and brass trumpets,
not only held such sacrifices, but, strange to say, held
them in honour of a kind of god of music, Tezcatlipoca. This
festival was the most important in Mexico, and took place
at the temple or "teocalli," a gigantic, pyramid-like mass
of stone, rising in terraces to a height of eighty-six feet
above the city, and culminating in a small summit platform
upon which the long procession of priests and victims could
be seen from all parts of the city. Once a year the sacrifice
was given additional importance, for then the most beautiful
youth in Mexico was chosen to represent the god himself. For
a year before the sacrifice he was dressed as Tezcatlipoca,
in royal robes and white linen, with a helmet-like crown of
sea shells with white cocks' plumes, and with an anklet hung
with twenty gold bells as a symbol of his power, and he was
married to the most beautiful maiden in Mexico. The priests
taught him to play the flute, and whenever the people heard
the sound of it they fell down and worshipped him.
The account may be found in Bancroft's great work on the
"Native Races of the Pacific," also Sahagun's "Nueva Espana
and Bernal Diaz," but perhaps the most dramatic description
is that by Rowbotham:
And when the morning of the day of sacrifice arrived,
he was taken by water to the Pyramid Temple where he
was to be sacrificed, and crowds lined the banks of the
river to see him in the barge, sitting in the midst of
his beautiful companions. When the barge touched the
shore, he was taken away from those companions of his
forever, and was delivered over to a band of priests,
exchanging the company of beautiful women for men
clothed in black mantles, with long hair matted with
blood--their ears also were mangled. These conducted
him to the steps of the pyramid, and he was driven
up amidst a crowd of priests, with drums beating and
trumpets blowing. As he went up he broke an earthen
flute on every step to show that his love, and his
delights were over. And when he reached the top, he was
sacrificed on an altar of jasper, and the signal that
the sacrifice was completed was given to the multitudes
below by the rolling of the great sacrificial drum.[04]
[02] _Kong_. His disciples called him _Fu Tsee_, or "the
master"; Jesuit missionaries Latinized this to Confucius.
[03] The Chinese theatre has been called an unconscious
parody of our old-fashioned Italian opera, and there
are certainly many resemblances. In a Chinese play,
when the situation becomes tragic, or when one of the
characters is seized with some strong emotion, it finds
vent in a kind of aria. The dialogue is generally given
in the most monotonous manner possible--using only
high throat and head tones, occasionally lowering or
raising the voice on a word, to express emotion. This
monotonous, and to European ears, strangely nonchalant,
nasal recitative, is being continually interrupted by
gong pounding and the shrill, high sound of discordant
reed instruments. When one or more of the characters
commits suicide (which as we know is an honoured custom
in China) he sings--or rather whines--a long chant before
he dies, just as his western operatic colleagues do, as,
for instance, Edgar in "Lucia di Lammermoor" and even,
to come nearer home, Siegfried in "Goetterdaemmerung."
[04] This drum was made of serpents' skins, and the sound of
it was so loud that it could be heard eight miles away.