Critical Historical Essays | Page 3

of courtship" seems
for many reasons to be inadequate and untenable. A much more
plausible explanation, it seems to me, is to be found in the theory of
Theophrastus, in which the origin of music is attributed to the whole
range of human emotion.
When an animal utters a cry of joy or pain it expresses its emotions in
more or less definite tones; and at some remote period of the earth's
history all primeval mankind must have expressed its emotions in much
the same manner. When this inarticulate speech developed into the use
of certain sounds as symbols for emotions--emotions that otherwise
would have been expressed by the natural sounds occasioned by
them--then we have the beginnings of speech as distinguished from
music, which is still the universal language. In other words, intellectual
development begins with articulate speech, leaving music for the
expression of the emotions.
To symbolize the sounds used to express emotion, if I may so put it, is
to weaken that expression, and it would naturally be the strongest
emotion that would first feel the inadequacy of the new-found speech.
Now what is mankind's strongest emotion? Even in the nineteenth
century Goethe could say, "'Tis fear that constitutes the god-like in
man." Certainly before the Christian era the soul of mankind had its
roots in fear. In our superstition we were like children beneath a great
tree of which the upper part was as a vague and fascinating mystery,

but the roots holding it firmly to the ground were tangible, palpable
facts. We feared--we knew not what. Love was human, all the other
emotions were human; fear alone was indefinable.
The primeval savage, looking at the world subjectively, was merely
part of it. He might love, hate, threaten, kill, if he willed; every other
creature could do the same. But the wind was a great spirit to him;
lightning and thunder threatened him as they did the rest of the world;
the flood would destroy him as ruthlessly as it tore the trees asunder.
The elements were animate powers that had nothing in common with
him; for what the intellect cannot explain the imagination magnifies.
Fear, then, was the strongest emotion. Therefore auxiliary aids to
express and cause fear were necessary when the speech symbols for
fear, drifting further and further away from expressing the actual thing,
became words, and words were inadequate to express and cause fear. In
that vague groping for sound symbols which would cause and express
fear far better than mere words, we have the beginning of what is
gradually to develop into music.
We all know that savage nations accompany their dances by striking
one object with another, sometimes by a clanking of stones, the
pounding of wood, or perhaps the clashing of stone spearheads against
wooden shields (a custom which extended until the time when shields
and spears were discarded), meaning thus to express something that
words cannot. This meaning changed naturally from its original one of
being the simple expression of fear to that of welcoming a chieftain;
and, if one wishes to push the theory to excess, we may still see a
shadowy reminiscence of it in the manner in which the violinists of an
orchestra applaud an honoured guest--perchance some famous
virtuoso--at one of our symphony concerts by striking the backs of their
violins with their bows.
To go back to the savages. While this clashing of one object against
another could not be called the beginning of music, and while it could
not be said to originate a musical instrument, it did, nevertheless, bring
into existence music's greatest prop, rhythm, an ally without which
music would seem to be impossible. It is hardly necessary to go into

this point in detail. Suffice it to say that the sense of rhythm is highly
developed even among those savage tribes which stand the lowest in
the scale of civilization to-day, for instance, the Andaman Islanders, of
whom I shall speak later; the same may be said of the Tierra del
Fuegians and the now extinct aborigines of Tasmania; it is the same
with the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, the Ajitas of the Philippines,
and the savages inhabiting the interior of Borneo.
As I have said, this more or less rhythmic clanking of stones together,
the striking of wooden paddles against the side of a canoe, or the
clashing of stone spearheads against wooden shields, could not
constitute the first musical instrument. But when some savage first
struck a hollow tree and found that it gave forth a sound peculiar to
itself, when he found a hollow log and filled up the open ends, first
with wood, and then--possibly getting the idea from his hide-covered
shield--stretched skins across the two open ends, then he had completed
the first musical instrument