two grand varieties, one appealing to the listener's grasp of the note Do, and the other to his grasp of the note La as the important one of the diatonic order. The former is called the major, the latter the minor mode. All of the fifteen keys may occur in either mode. In the representative nomenclature of the one the key is named from the note of the scale of reference (or the displacement of one of its notes) with which the Do of the referred scale coincides; in that of the other, from the note with which La coincides. We speak therefore of a composition as in the key of F or F# major, meaning that the notes which it uses form a diatonic scale whose Do (or note below the group of two tones) is the note F or its displacement F#; or as in the key of F or F# minor, meaning that in the embodiment of the scale in notes partly chromatic in which it is written, this note F or its displacement F# takes the place of La (or note between the upper two of the group of three tones).
This concentration of modern music upon two varieties of texture, major and minor, has been interpreted as a result of the substitution, at the time of the Reformation, of a music of Chords (Harmony) for the music of simultaneous melody (Polyphony) which had grown up in mediæval Europe.[1] The musical products of the Chinese consist entirely, according to our present information, either of pure melody, or of melody carried in octaves, notes at the fifth or fourth being occasionally added. No music of chords appears to exist among them, nor even a music of different simultaneous melodies. Nevertheless, what information we possess about later Chinese musical theory gives reason to believe that the Chinese recognize either of two notes as the fundamental one in their diatonic scale; that these two are Do and La; and that in theory, therefore, music in China exhibits the same division into a major and a minor system which it appears to have reached in Europe only after a long course of development into an entirely different form from that of the Chinese art. If we adopt the hypothesis that this dual
- ↑ Helmholtz shows (Tonempfindungen, 4th edn., p. 489) that when Do and La are taken for principal notes, the diatonic order yields a greater variety of more available chords than when any other notes are chosen.
