Critical Historical Essays | Page 8

words have become forgotten or lost in their
acquired ideal meaning." This applies with special force to the
languages of China, Egypt, and India. Up to the last two centuries our
written music was held in bondage, was "fossil music," so to speak.
Only certain progressions of sounds were allowed, for religion

controlled music. In the Middle Ages folk song was used by the Church,
and a certain amount of control was exercised over it; even up to the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the use of sharps and flats was frowned
upon in church music. But gradually music began to break loose from
its old chains, and in our own century we see Beethoven snap the last
thread of that powerful restraint which had held it so long.
The vital germ of music, as we know it, lay in the fact that it had
always found a home in the hearts of the common people of all nations.
While from time immemorial theory, mostly in the form of
mathematical problems, was being fought over, and while laws were
being laid down by religions and governments of all nations as to what
music must be and what music was forbidden to be, the vital spark of
the divine art was being kept alive deep beneath the ashes of life in the
hearts of the oppressed common folk. They still sang as they felt; when
the mood was sad the song mirrored the sorrow; if it were gay the song
echoed it, despite the disputes of philosophers and the commands of
governments and religion. Montaigne, in speaking of language, said
with truth, "'Tis folly to attempt to fight custom with theories." This
folk song, to use a Germanism, we can hardly take into account at the
present moment, though later we shall see that spark fanned into fire by
Beethoven, and carried by Richard Wagner as a flaming torch through
the very home of the gods, "Walhalla."
Let us go back to our dust heap. Words have been called "decayed
sentences," that is to say, every word was once a small sentence
complete in itself. This theory seems true enough when we remember
that mankind has three languages, each complementing the other. For
even now we say many words in one, when that word is reinforced and
completed by our vocabulary of sounds and expression, which, in turn,
has its shadow, gesture. These shadow languages, which accompany all
our words, give to the latter vitality and raise them from mere abstract
symbols to living representatives of the idea. Indeed, in certain
languages, this auxiliary expression even overshadows the spoken word.
For instance, in Chinese, the theng or intonation of words is much more
important than the actual words themselves. Thus the third intonation
or theng, as it is called in the Pekin dialect, is an upward inflection of

the voice. A word with this upward inflection would be unintelligible if
given the fourth theng or downward inflection. For instance, the word
"kwai" with a downward inflection means "honourable," but give it an
upward inflection "kwai" and it means "devil."
Just as a word was originally a sentence, so was a tone in music
something of a melody. One of the first things that impresses us in
studying examples of savage music is the monotonic nature of the
melodies; indeed some of the music consists almost entirely of one
oft-repeated sound. Those who have heard this music say that the actual
effect is not one of a steady repetition of a single tone, but rather that
there seems to be an almost imperceptible rising and falling of the
voice. The primitive savage is unable to sing a tone clearly and cleanly,
the pitch invariably wavering. From this almost imperceptible rising
and falling of the voice above and below one tone we are able to gauge
more or less the state of civilization of the nation to which the song
belongs. This phrase-tone corresponds, therefore, to the sentence-word,
and like it, gradually loses its meaning as a phrase and fades into a tone
which, in turn, will be used in new phrases as mankind mounts the
ladder of civilization.
At last then we have a single tone clearly uttered, and recognizable as a
musical tone. We can even make a plausible guess as to what that tone
was. Gardiner, in his "Music of Nature," tells of experiments he made
in order to determine the normal pitch of the human voice. By going
often to the gallery of the London Stock Exchange he found that the
roar of voices invariably amalgamated into one long note, which was
always F. If we look over the various examples of monotonic savage
music quoted by Fletcher, Fillmore, Baker, Wilkes, Catlin, and others,
we find additional corroboration of the statement; song