So great a musician as Dvorak, when he came to America, was profoundly moved by the original melodies of the American Negro, and became their enthusiastic champion. Indeed, they inspired the most beautiful of all his symphonies, the one entitled, “Aus der Neuen Welt.” I do not refer, of course, to the so-called Negro melodies composed by white men. Some of these are beautiful; but they are not Negro melodies. They do not express the Negro’s emotional life and he does not care much for them. Those wonderful songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers are the real thing. Some of those very melodies may have originated in Africa. Others are more developed than any that I heard in Africa; but they are very similar, and they use the same strange scales, which makes them unfamiliar to our ears and difficult to acquire. Among them, I really believe, are occasional motives as capable of development as those of Hungary. For a long time the music of Africa defied every attempt on my part to reduce it to musical notation. Very few persons have made the attempt; for it is easier to reduce their language to writing than their music. At first it seemed as inarticulate and spontaneous as the sound of the distant surf with which it blended, or the music of the night-wind in the bamboo. The melody of African music is strange to our ears, because, as I have said, it is usually derived from tone-systems that are unlike either our major or minor scales. They have the _pentatonic_ scale, that is, a major scale without the fourth and the seventh notes, thus avoiding the use of semitones; but their other scales are strange to most people. Among them are some of the scales of the _plain-song_ of the Roman Catholic Church—the _Gregorian chant_. The plain-song is the only survival (among ourselves) of ancient music. Modern music is based upon harmony, and consists essentially in a progression of chords. The successive tones of a modern melody acquire their character not chiefly from their own sequence, as do ancient melodies, but from the chords to which they belong; and the chords even when they are not voiced are always understood. But harmony itself is modern, dating from about the thirteenth century. African melodies cannot always be harmonized, and when the harmony is added it is not usually effective. But in African music another scale is employed which is not Gregorian, but oriental. It is a minor scale with an augmented interval—a tone and a half—between the sixth and seventh notes, that is, with a minor sixth and a major seventh. This peculiarly effective interval imparts an intense melancholy. Verdi, with delightful propriety, makes use of this very scale in Aïda, in the hymn of the Egyptian priestesses in the first act, where an extant Arab melody is introduced. This scale is probably the oldest tone-system in the world and may have come originally from the banks of the Ganges, in the far-distant past.