86 MUSIC cally beautiful must mainly direct him in the employment of his materials." Besides the authorities previously mentioned, see Fetis, Traite du contrepoint et de la fugue (Pans, 1825); Reicha, Traite de haute composition musicale, edited by Czerny (4 vols., Vienna, 1834)- Cherubini, Cours de contrepoint et de fugue (Paris, 1835 ; translated into English by 0. Clarke) ; Dehn, Lehre wm ContrapunU, &c. (Berlin, 1841) ; Marx, Die Lehre von der mu- sikalischen Composition (4 vols., Leipsic, 1852) ; Richter, Lehrbuch der Harmonie (Leipsic, 6th ed., 1866; translated into English by John P. Morgan, New York, 1867) ; Ouseley, " Treatise on Harmony" (Oxford, 1868); "Treatise on Counterpoint, Canon, and Fugue " (1869) ; and Weber, Allgemeine Mmiklehre (Darmstadt, 1872). HISTORY OF Music. The history of music is older than that of civilization. The most savage races are found to have some rude musical instruments, sufficient at least to mark certain rhythmical divisions of time and to serve as accompaniment to the dance ; those less savage have melodies ; while in all recorded instances where nations have advanced from barbarism to civilization music has followed the national growth. Among the oldest na- tions of whose history we have any knowledge it has been cultivated from time immemorial. The Hindoo, Chinese, and Japanese music is probably what it was thousands of years ago. The Chinese, whose music practically is -un- pleasant to refined ears, have some sweet-toned instruments, and a notation for the melodies played on them which is sufficiently clear. Their history and fables touching the art ante- 'date by many centuries those of classic na- tions; in the time of the emperor Hoangti, some centuries before the Christian era, they had discovered that the octave was divisible into 12 semitones. The relations which the Egyptians assigned between the sounds of mu- sic and the planets, the signs of the zodiac and the 24 hours, are all found among the Chinese. The two Chinese instruments, the Mn and the c7ie, contain all the elements of whatever scales.. Calculations among the Chinese on all combi- nations of sounds have been carried to a great extent. Kouie, a Chinese musician who lived 1,000 years before the assumed era of Orpheus, said : " When I play upon my Icing the animals range themselves spell-bound before me with melody." Confucius said 100 years before Pla- to : u Wouldst thou know if & people be well gov- erned, if its manners be good or bad, examine the music it practises." In their system and practice the Chinese detail eight kinds of sound under which all can be classed : metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, earthenware, skins, and wood. This division, according to them, is to be found in nature. The different substances are made into instruments. They are, besides the gong and the bamboo pipes, the Icin, a body of thin wood curved like the top of a violin to increase resonance, with five strings of silk of different sizes ; the che, an instrument kindred to the Mn, but having the chromatic or scale of half tones ; the king, a frame of wood with pendent stone, graduated through 16 notes, and struck with a hammer ; drums ; a species of flutes, which anciently had but three finger holes ; brass instruments of the trumpet spe- cies; guitars resembling the mandolin; and little boards with a pleasant sound. The Chi- nese make use of music in their most dignified ceremonies. The sacred imperial hymn, sung with great pomp annually, is a sequence of long-drawn notes, precisely parallel to the^early church music in unison, and lacking the inter- val of the fourth and seventh, like the old crude popular scales of some European nations. The secular melodies of the Chinese are found- ed upon sequences of notes, such as are found in playing on the black keys of the pianoforte. They eschew all harmony on principle. Music makes no progress among the Chinese, as their sumptuary laws would restrain its development if there were genius to advance it. The head of the musicians in China is called conservator of the five capital virtues : humanity, justice, politeness, wisdom, and rectitude. Their mu- sic affects a certain seriousness, rejecting the sensuous element. The Persians rank vocally among them as the Italians do among us, and it has been said that singers from that country make concert tours in China. The higher style of oriental music, which has a limited degree of melodious merit, with rhythms logically and distinctly drawn from consociation with poetry as refined and liquid as the Italian, may be found in that of India, dating also from the re- motest antiquity. The poetic legends of Hin- dostan, and indeed of all southern Asia, rival those of China and Greece in ascribing fabu- lous effects to music. The Hindoos consider every art as a direct revelation from heaven ; and while their inferior deities communicated other parts, it was Brahma himself who pre- sented music to mortals. To his son Nared is imputed the invention of the vina, a stringed instrument with a finger or key board for frets, being of the same family as the modern guitar. The Hindoo writers on music (and there are works exhibiting earnest study of its mathe- matical bases) theoretically recognize divisions of the scale corresponding to our octave in 22 fractional tones, these fractions being quarters or thirds, or approximate equivalents. As to the fractions, they admit practically that they have no existence, since only tones or semi- tones are known in their actual compositions. The succession of tones and semitones in their scale is that of the diatonic. The seven notes of this scale they term swarras or sounds, the first or key note being distinguished from all others by this generic word, and the six others by different names. But their words being polysyllabic, the ancient Hindoo artists took their first syllables only to designate respec- tively the notes of the scale. The syllables thus chosen are quite as good as the Italian do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do, and are as follows :
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