The art of music in the Orient and the art of music in Western Europe have little in common. It may be that Christian music in the first few centuries of its existence was vaguely similar to that music we have been discussing, but after harmony found its place in our music a comparison between the two arts is far to seek. In Oriental music the dominant feature is rhythm, insistent and often unvaried. This may be partly because rhythm is the most exciting element in music and the most immediate in its appeal, partly because in the Orient music was and is almost never dissociated from the dance or from some sort of regular movement such as rowing or reaping. In our music rhythm is constantly varied and subtly disguised. As for melody, the Orientals are bound to short phrases repeated again and again, lacking contrast and only primitively balanced; and most of their melodies are in scales different from ours. Of harmony they have relatively no idea, whereas the music of Western Europe has been subjected to the tremendously powerful influence of harmony in one form or another for nearly a thousand years. Hence, even though the rhythm and melody in both have come from the same instinct in the race of man, the Western and the Eastern arts of music seem almost radically different. In general the difference between the two is only exaggerated by the few cases in modern music when composers have made use of Oriental themes or rhythms or instruments. Such cases by no means show a working together or an approach of the two systems; for the mere fact that a certain twist of melody, a certain insistence of rhythm, a beat of the tam-tam or the gong can give a strong Oriental color to music proves how foreign Oriental music still sounds to our ears. It may be said that European music has been influenced by Asiatic music hardly at all, unless, possibly, the prominent, almost barbaric rhythms of some Russian music have sprung from a mixture of the Oriental with the Slav. F. H. M. FOOTNOTES: [12] Musical development of civilized races removed from European influence. [13] Julien Tiersot: _Notes d’ethnographie musicale_ (première séries), Paris, 1905. [14] What we may call modern Chinese music probably reached China through Bactria, a Greek kingdom, founded by Diodotus 256 B. C. Jesuit missionaries jumped to the conclusion that the Greeks borrowed the Pythagorean scale from the Chinese, but the 'Chinese’ scale did not exist in China until two centuries after its appearance in Greece. Chinese literature on music goes back no farther than the ninth century of the Christian era, to which date may be assigned the Chieh Ku Lu, a treatise on the deer-skin drum, introduced into China from Central Asia, and evidently of Scythian origin. There are several important works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the history and theory of music are fully discussed.