Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/89

77 MUSIC PART L HISTORY. Defini- II /TUSIC 1 is the art which employs sounds as a medium tion. _[J_ of artistic expression for what is not in the pro vince of literature, of sculpture, of painting, of acting, or of architecture. Whereas literature, whether in verse or prose, describes or states emotions, .or perceptions, or im pressions ; whereas sculpture imitates the outward forms of animated beings, and physiognomically, either in the face, or, to speak more broadly, in the moulding and attitude of the entire figure, displays personal character and the effect of passion upon it; whereas painting vitalizes with colour the forms of sculpture, and extends its range of subjects from animate to inanimate nature ; and whereas acting adds speech to the written words of the dramatist, and enforces or even qualifies their meaning by vocal inflexion, and illustrates it by changeful gesture, thus giving the mobility of life to the forms of sculpture and painting ; music embodies the inward feelings of which all those other arts can but exhibit the effect. Those other arts are imitative in respect of their repro ducing natural objects or circumstances ; it is otherwise with architecture, which makes but conventional reference to nature, and wholly arbitrary application of the lines, the lights, and the shadows of the natural world ; and in this particular music has an analogy to architecture which it has not to the other fine arts. In the matter of expression also, architecture may be compared with music in the earlier stages of its development, since represent ing and also prompting a general idea of solemnity, or grandeur, or gaiety ; but music left architecture far behind when, in later times, it assumed the power of special, individual, and personal utterance of every variety of passion. The indefiniteness of musical expression furnishes no argument that music is inexpressive, but is one of the qualities that place it on the highest level of art-excel lence, enabling it to suggest still more than it displays, and to stimulate the imagination of the witness as much as to exercise that of the artist. The musician is then a poet, whether we regard the term in its primary sense of "maker," the exact translation of the Greek word by which versifiers were styled in early English, or in its ap plied sense of one who expresses thought and feeling through the medium of highly-excited imagination. Music, then, is that one of the fine arts which appropriates the phenomena of sound to the purposes of poetry, and has a province of its own in many respects analogous to, but yet wholly distinct from, that of each of the other arts. It is common to style it " the universal language ; " but the definition is untrue, for in every age and in every clime there are varieties of musical idiom which are unsympa thetic, if not unintelligible, to other generations than those among whom they are first current, and, still more, the very principles that govern it have been and are so variously developed in different times and places that music which is delightful at one period or to one people is repugnant at another epoch or to a different community. An attempt will here be made to sketch the progress of the art through Western civilization, to show how it has been changed from artificial or calculated into natural or spontaneous, and to describe some of the chief forms of its manifestation. 2 1 From the Greek fj.ovffiicri ; but this included all arts and sciences over which the Muses presided -the encyclopaedia of learning. The science of sounds was particularly involved in that of the stars, and hence the word had special reference to these two in their relation to numbers; and in its comprehensive sense it was employed to denote the entire mental training of a Greek youth. In Latin the word had a more restricted meaning. 2 William ChappelPs History of Music is the authority for the cor- To define the special science, and the art which is its Harmony application, that is denoted by our word music, the Greek and language has two other words, harmonia or harmonike m<ilody - and melodia, harmonia implying the idea of " fitting," and so being a term for propriety or general unity of parts in a whole, not in our limited technical sense of combined sounds, but with reference to the whole principle of orderly and not specially tonal regulation, melodia imply ing the rising and falling of the voice in speech, and being applied only at a subsequent epoch to a succession of musical notes? We thus owe our three chief musical terms to the Greeks, and in our prevailing system much more besides ; they themselves, however, owed all to earlier sources, for the essentials of their knowledge and practice are traced to Egypt. It has been ingeniously suggested and well sustained by Origin. Mr. J. F. Rowbotham that in prehistoric times music passed through three stages of development, each charac terized by a separate class of instrument, and the analogy of existing uses in barbarous nations tends to confirm the assumption. Instruments of percussion are supposed to be the oldest, wind instruments the next in order of time and of civilization, and string instruments the latest invention of every separate race. The clapping of hands and stamping of feet, let us say, in marking rhythm exemplify the first element of music, and the large family of drums and cymbals and bells is a development of the same principle. Untutored ears are quicker to perceive rhythmical accentuation than variations of pitch, so the organ of time makes earlier manifestation than the organ of tune, though, musical sound being a periodic succes sion of vibrations, the operation of the latter is truly but a refinement on that of the former. The sighing of wind, eminently when passing over a bed of reeds, is Nature s suggestion of instruments of breath ; hence have been reached the four methods of producing sound through pipes : by blowing at the end, as in the case of the English flute and the flageolet ; at the side, as in that of the ordinary con cert flute ; through a double reed, as in that of the hautboy or oboe and bassoon ; and over a single reed, as in that of the clarionet all of which date from oldest existing records; and also upon the collection of multitudinous pipes in that colossal wind instrument, the organ. An Egyptian fable ascribes the invention of the lyre to the god Thoth ; a different Greek fable gives the same credit to the god Hermes ; and both refer it, though under different circum stances, to the straining of the sinews of a tortoise across its shell, whence can only be inferred that the origin of the highest advanced class of musical instruments is un known. This class includes the lyre and the harp, which give but one note from each stretched string ; the lute, which, having a neck or finger-board, admits of the pro duction of several notes from each string by stopping it at different lengths with the fingers ; the viol, the addition of the bow to which gives capability of sustaining the tone ; and the dulcimer, finally matured into the pianoforte, wherein the extremes of instrumental fabrication meet, since this is at once a string instrument and an instrument rection of errors in the works wherein the history and theory of Greek music were first treated in modern times, errors that have been re peated by intervening writers; and it is the authority for explanation of Greek technicalities that are misrepresented in Latin translations, and falsely understood in our own day. 3 Harmonia had a special signification with the disciples of Pytha goras, who used the word in place of enharmonia, of which more hereafter.