No history of music can pretend to completeness that does not give some account of the various musical systems that have developed before or outside of the influence of European civilization, though in truth music, in comparison with the other arts in Europe, has assimilated astonishingly little from the peoples of the Orient or from ancient civilization, for European music is based essentially upon harmony, and harmony, taking the word in its accepted meaning, was unknown to ancient nations, and is unknown to-day in countries of the Orient. We must admit that tricks of rhythm and melody came from the Orient into Spain at the time of the Moorish Conquest, were even brought back to Europe by the Crusaders returning from their distant wanderings. Furthermore the lute and perhaps the violin, both of which have held an important place in the development of European music, came from Arabia. But that the technique or structure of our music has been considerably influenced by the music of other races is quite out of the question. On the other hand, composers have, from time to time, enlivened their music by touches of Oriental color. They have experimented with Oriental melody and rhythm, they have sometimes used strange instruments foreign to Europe. We may cite, for instance, Goldmark’s _Sakuntala Overture_; Bizet’s _Les Pêcheurs de Perles_; Félicien David’s symphonic ode, _Le Désert_; Rimsky-Korsakov’s glowing Oriental _Scheherezade_; Balakirev’s _Islamey_, etc. These experiments cannot but call our attention to those elaborate exotic systems of music which were flourishing in India, in China, in Japan, in Siam and Java, in Arabia and Persia centuries before the age of Bach and Handel. While Europe was still slowly emerging from the barbarism of the Middle Ages music had reached a high state of development in these countries. Strange instruments of many kinds were in use; there was an art of composition, frequently some form of notation; there was a musical profession and 'much discussion of musical acoustics and æsthetics.’ An authority[13] on musical ethnology says of the Arabs: 'At this day, when the decadence of the Arab civilization has been entirely consummated it still retains enough traces of its former splendor to enable us to claim without fear that at the time of its greatest florescence it was certainly as rich, probably even richer, than European art at the same epoch.’ I