Near the City of Charites.
THE MYSTERY OF THE “SLENDER BRASS.”
This chapter is a pendant to that on “Midas the Glorious.” It is an
afterthought which my long familiarity with free reeds has given birth
to. One day I chanced to buy a child’s toy, a little trombone, perfect
in slide action, and in succession of tones. Following my habit of
experimenting with reeds, pursuing therein the course of a lifetime’s
devotion to such attractions, I naturally desired, childlike, to see
the inside of this trombone. It contained a slide within a tube,
and upon this slide a series of free reeds set tandem fashion; upon
lengthening the trombone, each reed in succession was brought to the
one air hole which alone was provided for the issue of the sounds from
the series of reeds. For so small an instrument, merely a toy be it
remembered, there was great power, and correct pitch.
By a freak of memory, Midas and his flute came to mind, and words of
Pindar flashed through my brain with a new significance. Was the free
reed used in the flute of Midas? that was the question. Pindar, as was
stated, was himself familiar with the flute; he came of a family of
flute players, and therefore his description has a more than casual
purport, for we may be sure that he had clearly in mind every detail
he directed attention to by his words, and knew everything affecting
the instrument. Pindar, having stated how Maiden Athene fashioned the
flute with its varied strain, and bestowed it on man, then proceeds to
describe it and its musical sound. Of the sound of the flute he writes:—
Through slender brass it flows.
It had not occurred to me before to think of any distinct implication
in the words; but now I question very much the pleasantness of a brass
tube taken into the mouth, in length nearly two inches, with its
vibrating tongue in action; not like a cup-piece outside the lips, as
in the trumpet and trombone.
Fancy it: a brassy taste! Surely this was not the idea he would convey,
of a player’s hot moist lips straining upon a slender tube of brass. We
shall get his words more literally in prose:—
When it passes through the slender brass and through the
reeds,—which grew near the city Charites, the city with
beautiful places for the dance.
The flute itself could not be called slender, being interiorly three
eighths of an inch; and, moreover, it was but the casing that was of
brass, and that only with flutes after the invention of that sectional
arrangement of sliding cylindrical pieces over each aperture, the tube
itself being of ivory, or of elder, or of sycamore. Thus, then, the
question arises. What slender brass had Pindar in mind?
Accepting the prose as the more literal translation, note the “and,” as
if Pindar meant, and _then_ through the reeds, and further it may be of
importance that the _plural_ is given “reeds.”
Although I have presented the picture of the two flutes that in
style accord with the flute designed by the sculptor as if that upon
such Midas played, I believe that a scrutiny of dates forbids the
supposition; those flutes will prove to be of too late a date, Midas
is certainly more likely to have used the _double_ flutes pictured
upon the vases,—the bulbed flutes, and not the single ones fingered
by the two hands. In the plural case, the two flutes would be rightly
described, being the style with the two reed-pipes, one for each hand.
Accepting Pindar’s words literally—“slender brass”—I think that we
must believe that he meant to describe the reed as of brass: a reed of
slender metal through which the breath passed on its way, urging the
reed into vibration. Now, what I would suggest is that, if silk reached
Greece from China in those days, why should not the free reed? Actually
it is of slender brass.
I have made experiments with the free reed upon my copies of the Greek
flutes in the British Museum, and see very clearly the possibility of
the adaptation of the free reed to the hollow cocoon-like bulb pictured
of the flutes in the paintings upon the Etruscan vases, and which, as
you have read, I interpret as being designed to hold a reed within
it; the first, second, or third bulb being selected for the purpose,
according to “the mode” of the particular piece of music that was to
be played. The bulbs are quite large enough for holding the free reed
of the requisite size and flexibility.
In the Chinese organ “Sheng” the little brass free reed is fixed on a
small quill-like reed stem and is passed through a hole into the _bowl_
that holds the series of reeds. The position of the reed for sounding
is exactly the same as that which I am supposing for it in the _bulb_.
Again, it has been supposed from a remark made by an ancient reporter
that a certain flute player in a contest was unable to play because of
an accident by which his flute reed had become bent; that therefore it
may have been a metal reed such as the free reed.
The question has also an acoustic bearing; according to Weber’s law,
the free reed is amenable to variations of pitch: by its nature it is
able to accommodate itself, and may be taken down an octave in pitch
under the influence of the tube with which it is associated; but upon
that descent of pitch being reached, it starts back again to its own
pitch. Joining such a reed to the flute, I find that its pitch is
lowered as each hole is in succession closed, but that at the last hole
it refuses to speak at all. This shows that a different reed should
be selected that would be flexible enough to accommodate itself to
altered conditions of tube; but to obtain the right reed will demand
a course of arduous experiment upon new ground, the best teacher
being experience. I said that the reed refuses to speak. Here comes a
noticeable fact: by extreme high pressure I can induce it to speak,
and that powerfully. Have we not in this fact some hint—or, may be,
explanation—of that strange demand of the Greeks, as it seems to us,
for a bandage, a _phorbeion_, like a halter over the head, to prevent
the bursting of the cheeks of the player? This intensely produced
note may be the kind of note they wanted,—that which they prized and
acclaimed in Midas. The probability is that the whole series of notes
was produced on this high pressure system, in open air, and intended to
be heard by a vast concourse of people. When I played softly or with
average strength of breath, I found that I could not take the reed
beyond a fourth. Does not this appear to account for the limitation to
four holes which so long prevailed? In our own course of evolution of
instruments from early times progress has been slow; many centuries
passed before the first little brass key was invented and applied to
flutes. With the clarionet it was the same: the sudden burst into new
life being due to one man,—Denner. From the first to the last period
in the development of Greek flutes there were no doubt well marked
transition stages of which we possess no record: new inventions equally
momentous to them as to us, and upon which new players started into
pre-eminence. Midas was credited with the invention of the particular
flute upon which he won renown; and it may have been that Pindar
intentionally specified it, and that it may have consisted in the
application of a free reed of slender brass to obtain a greater range
of notes.
The free reed in the way that I have suggested was equally applicable
to the double and to the single flute; and therefore, whatever the kind
of flute upon which glorious Midas played, and won his laurel wreaths
and his immortal renown, the special epithet of Pindar would hold true:—
Through slender brass it flows.
The little brass reeds are easily made, the metal is very thin, and
three strokes of a tiny chisel cut the reed. To a people so skilled
in the working of metal in jewellery as the Etruscan and Greek, the
making of these fine reeds would present no difficulty. Unfortunately,
the slenderness has been adverse to preservation. These perishable
reeds,—what tomb enshrines the one which is to satisfy our longing to
know! A learned professor tells me that the Pompeiians were of the
Oscan tribe, being in their remotest line called the Sabellic race,
that they belonged to the large ancient group of the “Aryans.” In late
times, these people mixed with the Etruscans, Pelasgians, and Safines,
and their writing was similar to the Greek; and, according to language,
they were related to the Sanskrit and to the Iranian languages,—namely,
the Jadian and Persian. So in all our wanderings we are brought back to
the old home,—to Persia, where the pathways of music begin.