knowledge of its theory, which seems to have assumed a very elaborate and exact form from even the most remote times.[1] Kiesewetter warns us, however, against mistaking such information about the musical theories of a people for knowledge of the state of the art itself among them. " I have long felt," he writes,[2] "that the practical music of many Asiatic peoples, ancient and modern, must have been and must be a totally different thing from the metaphysical or mathematical music of their philosophers, which as pure speculation must always have held itself apart from practice. We have erred in reasoning from the writings of theorists among these peoples to the nature of their art itself." In large measure, doubtless, this tendency among students of the ethnology of music to forget that the books of theorists may not reflect the methods of performers is the result of the extreme difficulty of investigating the actual products among other races of an art essentially evanescent as music is. The cases are rare in which they come to the hearing of trained musicians; we can infer for the most part only their scale structure from instrumental forms: and their record in notation is in general both imperfect and scanty. The invention of the phonograph bids fair to render the practice of music among non-European peoples as accessible to study as their ideas about the act have hitherto been. Whenever a phonographic cylinder can be exposed to a musical performance a close copy of the original texture of tone is fixed in a form which admits of subsequent examination of the most careful kind whenever and wherever desired.[3]
- ↑ The principal sources of information in regard to Chinese music are the work of Père Amiot, which forms vol. vi of Memoires concernant l'histoire, les sciences, etc., des Chinois, par les Missionaires de Pekin, Paris, 1780; and the recent essay of J. A. Van Aalst already referred to.
- ↑ Ueber die Musik der neueren Griechen, p. 32, quoted in Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, 1862, vol. i, p. 56.
- ↑ The need for an instrument of this description in the study of music was expressed thirty years ago by Moritz Hauptmann (Briefe an Hauser, Leipzig, 1871, Bd. ii, p. 150). "Would that we could make musical photographs which should preserve our present art for the future: and would that we had them from the past. Then we should know, among other things, something about Greek music, which we are now acquainted with only through the entirely unmusical philologists; i.e. are not acquainted with at all."
