Critical and Historical Essays: Lectures delivered at Columbia UniversityMacDowell, Edward
History
Critical and Historical Essays: Lectures delivered at Columbia University
MacDowell, Edward
Music -- History and criticism
Now this, the trumpet species of pipe, we find also used as an
auxiliary "spiritual" help to the drum. We are told by M. Huc,
in his "Travels in Thibet," that the llamas of Thibet have
a custom of assembling on the roofs of Lhassa at a stated
period and blowing enormous trumpets, making the most hideous
midnight din imaginable. The reason given for this was that
in former days the city was terrorized by demons who rose from
a deep ravine and crept through all the houses, working evil
everywhere. After the priests had exorcised them by blowing
these trumpets, the town was troubled no more. In Africa the
same demonstration of trumpet blowing occurs at an eclipse
of the moon; and, to draw the theory out to a thin thread,
anyone who has lived in a small German Protestant town will
remember the chorals which are so often played before sunrise
by a band of trumpets, horns, and trombones from the belfry of
some church tower. Almost up to the end of the last century
trombones were intimately connected with the church service;
and if we look back to Zoroaster we find the sacerdotal
character of this species of instrument very plainly indicated.
Now let us turn back to the Pan's pipes and its direct
descendants, the flute, the clarinet, and the oboe. We shall
find that they had no connection whatever with religious
observances. Even in the nineteenth century novel we are
familiar with the kind of hero who played the flute--a very
sentimental gentleman always in love. If he had played the
clarinet he would have been very sorrowful and discouraged; and
if it had been the oboe (which, to the best of my knowledge,
has never been attempted in fiction) he would have needed to
be a very ill man indeed.
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