Critical Historical Essays | Page 5

but
modifications of the drum; for what is a bell but a metal drum with one
end left open and the drum stick hung inside?
Strange to say, as showing the marvellous potency of primeval instincts,
bells placed in church towers were supposed to have much of the
supernatural power that the savage in his wilderness ascribed to the
drum. We all know something of the bell legends of the Middle Ages,
how the tolling of a bell was supposed to clear the air of the plague, to
calm the storm, and to shed a blessing on all who heard it. And this
superstition was to a certain extent ratified by the religious ceremonies
attending the casting of church bells and the inscriptions moulded in
them. For instance, the mid-day bell of Strasburg, taken down during
the French Revolution, bore the motto
"I am the voice of life."
Another one in Strasburg:
"I ring out the bad, ring in the good."

Others read
"My voice on high dispels the storm."
"I am called Ave Maria I drive away storms."
"I who call to thee am the Rose of the World and am called Ave
Maria."
The Egyptian sistrum, which in Roman times played an important rôle
in the worship of Isis, was shaped somewhat like a tennis racquet, with
four wire strings on which rattles were strung. The sound of it must
have been akin to that of our modern tambourine, and it served much
the same purpose as the primitive drum, namely, to drive away Typhon
or Set, the god of evil. Dead kings were called "Osiris" when placed in
their tombs, and sistri put with them in order to drive away Set.
Beside bells and rattles we must include all instruments of the
tambourine and gong species in the drum category. While there are
many different forms of the same instrument, there are evidences of
their all having at some time served the same purpose, even down to
that strange instrument about which Du Chaillu tells us in his
"Equatorial Africa", a bell of leopard skin, with a clapper of fur, which
was rung by the wizard doctor when entering a hut where someone was
ill or dying. The leopard skin and fur clapper seem to have been
devised to make no noise, so as not to anger the demon that was to be
cast out. This reminds us strangely of the custom of ringing a bell as
the priest goes to administer the last rites.
It is said that first impressions are the strongest and most lasting;
certain it is that humanity, through all its social and racial evolutions,
has retained remnants of certain primitive ideas to the present day. The
army death reveille, the minute gun, the tolling of bells for the dead, the
tocsin, etc., all have their roots in the attributes assigned to the
primitive drum; for, as I have already pointed out, the more civilized a
people becomes, the more the word-symbols degenerate. It is this
continual drifting away of the word-symbols from the natural sounds
which are occasioned by emotions that creates the necessity for

auxiliary means of expression, and thus gives us instrumental music.
Since the advent of the drum a great stride toward civilization had been
made. Mankind no longer lived in caves but built huts and even
temples, and the conditions under which he lived must have been
similar to those of the natives of Central Africa before travellers opened
up the Dark Continent to the caravan of the European trader. If we look
up the subject in the narratives of Livingstone or Stanley we find that
these people lived in groups of coarsely-thatched huts, the village being
almost invariably surrounded by a kind of stockade. Now this manner
of living is identically the same as that of all savage tribes which have
not passed beyond the drum state of civilization, namely, a few huts
huddled together and surrounded by a palisade of bamboo or cane.
Since the pith would decompose in a short time, we should probably
find that the wind, whirling across such a palisade of pipes--for that is
what our bamboos would have turned to--would produce musical
sounds, in fact, exactly the sounds that a large set of Pan's pipes would
produce. For after all what we call Pan's pipes are simply pieces of
bamboo or cane of different lengths tied together and made to sound by
blowing across the open tops.
The theory may be objected to on the ground that it scarcely proves the
antiquity of the pipe to be less than that of the drum; but the objection
is hardly of importance when we consider that the drum was known
long before mankind had reached the "hut" stage of civilization. Under
the head of pipe,