In Ancient China.
CEREMONIAL INSTRUMENTS.
Bells, Chimes and Gongs are held in high esteem by the Chinese, they
are indispensable in their Ceremonies and Ritual, in their Festivities,
national and social. So ancient is their use that the order of their
coming into existence, or the date of origin are mythical, each kind
of instrument seems equally old, still they had to be accounted for in
Chinese logic of history.
One of the most curious traits in the character of the human animal
is an unfeigned delight in super-exaggerated noise. Other animals are
affrighted at noise, but the human animal makes a deliberate orgie
of noise as a special means by arrangement for obtaining a sensual
satisfaction of the ear. Amongst savage tribes and barbarous nations,
and amongst nations emerged from barbarism well banded in social
communities, everywhere we find that this sheer delight in noise,
called music, is manifest and on record. Not merely called so, but
dignified and accepted as music. ’Tis true that the Indian savage says
his music is to frighten away devils and evil spirits, and the Chinaman
tells us that his earsplitting distracting music is to make night
horrible to the dragons threatening to devour the moon; but depend upon
it, the devils and dragons are quite subsidiary to the main desire for
indulgence in noise; and the excuse, we, perfectly well knowing the
innate hypocrisy of the human animal, can complacently allow to pass.
The love of noise belongs to us. Nature’s gift—like the love of art for
art’s sake, is a love of noise for noise’ sake; it is only a change
of phrase. We should not decry this, nor should we plume ourselves
upon our civilization as freeing ourselves from this original taint of
barbarism. I confess to thoroughly enjoying a thunderstorm, my nature
is absorbed in an energy greater than the individual, and I revel in
it. Man’s love of power is the basis of such satisfaction.
Into this mood of meditation I was drawn the other evening after
listening to Wagner’s “Procession of the Gods.” How the music takes
hold of you, dips you in a sea of noise, and makes you feel alive all
over. For this reason Wagner’s grand music is grand,—is greater than
you. Your whole frame is plunged into an elemental excitement to which
every nerve fibre thrills, and you feel conscious that latent impulses
native to your being are awakened into activity; the barbaric strain
in us responds, and exalts us beyond our conventional state. Noise or
music? Well, technically we make a distinction. Ask a casuist what is
the difference between virtue and vice, and he will tell you it all
depends,—one may be as bad as the other. So of noise and music, one
may be as bad as the other; aye, even worse. By all accounts much music
is; but that may be prejudice. I have heard that some people decry
Wagner’s music as a saturnalia of hubbub and noise. But it has one
redeeming folly,—it lives: hence the censors, being human, often live
to pardon.
Our scientific definitions of noise and music serve the purpose
of science, but the truth is that with nature noise and music are
identical in origin. There is orderly noise and disorderly noise,
and music is of the orderly kind,—that is all. Discording noise,
undiscording noise. Milton understood this, writing of singing
With melodious noise,
and replying
With undiscording voice.
I want to emphasize this teaching, want to impress you with the
conviction that all the excitement we are seeking in our most modern
style of music is but a reversion to our original instinctive desire
for a dynamical excitement,—not an excitement merely æsthetical and
phychical, but actually moving, forceful, elemental; a true barbaric
love of stir and thrill,—and rightly so. If you think, you will find
in all our modern ways a tendency to this reversion to a belief in and
a culture of our original instincts. The realism of the day is the
expression of a desire to understand life as it is to the individual.
The hideousness of a merely conglomerate community is making itself
felt upon every plane of society, and the concurrent aspiration is to
be more human.
Culture will one day exhaust the conventional, and in music the
tendency is apparent. The vast volume of choral sound we listen to
stirs us with contagious emotion. Our pleasure in grand organs with
their roll of diapasons and arresting challenge of trumpets and tubas;
our willing yielding up of ourselves to be swayed hither and thither
for hours in the power of the massive orchestra, that wonderful machine
of nerves and muscles,—what does it mean? It is all dynamical, all
barbaric. It is not only the ear that is concerned in listening, the
whole being is under strain and stress. Do I hence imply that it is
wrong, is reprehensible so to employ music? By no means. The moral
of it is that the strong innate tendencies of our nature are best
recognized, and used; nay, that they will be, will force themselves to
the surface, and that under culture we may train them to our advantage.
For civilization must go forward, is not content to-day with that which
contented it yesterday. The appetite grows by that it feeds on; more
and more we ask for intensity of excitement.
A scientific writer of an earlier generation, I think it was Leslie,
defined the ear as an organ of touch, which we now under the
evolutionary investigation of development understand it to be; and
this is what I would have you recognise, that sound is able _to touch
us_, able to awaken a net-work of nerve organization, to make the lip
tense, to cause the eyelids to quiver and the heart to throb; the
breath to come and go in accord with the aërial pulsations,—as a hand
that is laid upon us to arrest or to exalt, to invigorate or to soothe.
_Hearing_ is an exalted _feeling_.
The Chinese, long before Englishmen existed, found delight in the
dynamical influences of great sounds. Their largest and most potent
sources of music were bells and chimes, gongs and drums. These supplied
them with that excitement which is afforded us by the masses of sound
from our large orchestras and grand organs. We say that their music
is nothing more than deafening noise. They say that our music is no
music; it is bad noise. So it is only matter of choice how you shall
be stimulated. It’s all the same,—opium or whisky: purely a racial
question.
Very early the Chinese attained great skill in the making of bells; and
it may be that among these people the art of Bell Founding originated,
and from the east extended over Europe. Bells are particularly
associated with religious ceremonials in all countries, and have
generally superstitious credentials. The Chinese frighten dragons with
them; and the Christians exorcise devils with them. The Russians, who
bridge the earth between Europe and China, are especially reverential
to bells. The great bell at the Kremlin, Moscow—over 21ft. in height
and 67ft. in circumference—is world famous, as we have known since we
were boys.
The inevitable _Ling Lun_ was ordered to cast twelve bells to
correspond to the twelve _lüs_. Metal, the Chinese say, is one of
the five elements, and necessarily has its place in music. The bell
metal is composed of six parts of copper and one of tin. When melting,
the alloy appears to be of an impure dark colour, soon changing into
a yellowish white, which gradually passes to a greenish white, and
when this last has become green the metal is ready for pouring into
the mould. There is in the South Kensington Museum a large and very
handsome bell from a Japanese Buddhist temple, which is a fine example
of the colour desired. The bells have not clappers, but are struck with
wooden mallets.
Smaller bells, however, have clappers, and the little “_Fêng-ling_”
or “wind-bells,” which hang at the eaves of houses and pagodas, are
ingeniously contrived to secure effect, light silk ribbon streamers
being attached to their clappers so that the softest breezes awakened
the sweet sounds. The wind-bells were often hung in halls and corridors
for sake of these effects.
Bells of all sizes, from those weighing fifty tons down to the small
ones which swing on the eaves of pagodas, used to be found all over
China. Some are ornamented with characters, some with designs and
symbols; some are round, some are square; and all are mainly used for
religious purposes. At the door of each Buddhist temple a bell is seen
which the believers on entering strike “to call the attention of the
sleeping gods.”
The most ancient Chinese bells were quadrate in form. Bells belonged
originally to the Confucian religion, but the Buddhists also adopted
their use, and they are commonly to be found in the temples of both. At
the temple of Confucius is a great bell which the Chinese say is made
to correspond with the very big drum; the one is not used without the
other, for the drum had to give the signal to begin, and the bell had
to announce the end of the hymn at the ceremonies. This bell is called
the _Yung Chung_. There is another suspended upon a single frame,
which has to give the note at the beginning of each verse in order “to
manifest the sound” or give the pitch. This bell is called the _Po
Chung_, and is here illustrated. The shape, as will be noticed, differs
from that of modern bells.
[Illustration: _The Chinese Po-Chung._
_Fig. 34._]
All their bells are cast to produce a sound definite in pitch, and in
their sets of smaller bells and gongs the primitive scale of sounds and
its successive order was intended to be kept to so far as the means at
command enabled them to secure accuracy, or as near as ceremonial usage
required them to be—for with these people ceremonial is religion.
The next illustration is of the _Yung-lo_ or “gong chimes,” composed
of ten little gongs suspended upon a frame by silk cords. In making
gongs the Chinese are marvellously expert, and specimens of the genuine
ancient sort are highly prized here; the tone has a richness and
endurance which moderns fail to equal. These little gongs are all of
the same diameter, but differ in thickness. The _Yung-lo_ is used at
court, mainly on joyful occasions. The larger sized gongs—sometimes
they are two feet in diameter—are remarkably fine, and are very
generally in use in processions and at various social functions, as
well as in temples to waken the gods. He must be a rare sleeper who
would be deaf to such a call.
[Illustration: _The Yung-lo or Gong Chimes_.
_Fig. 35._]