The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and SumerSmith, Hermann
History
The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and Sumer
Smith, Hermann
Music -- To 500 -- History and criticism
Yet the appearance of Pan marks only one stage in the land of myth, and
that only just within the confines near where the border lines of myth
and history meet. For many thousand years beyond this the imagination
must travel to reach the earliest sources of music. The complete set
of seven pipes claimed by Pan was not the work of a summer’s day, the
scale as seven sounds was not the witchery of a nymph’s voice happily
remembered by a forest God; no, we may be sure the course of life was
more prosaic than that, and the seven-toned instrument had, as a seven
branched river, its beginning from one,—one pipe, ages, it may be,
earlier than the seven.
What do I make of it? Clearly this,—man IS a measuring animal. Like
other animals he calculates, forecasts and provides, but he alone
possesses the measuring faculty. Rambling again and again through the
region of the past, the thought presses forward for recognition that
man is a measuring animal, and hence his ability to produce instruments
of music. In the beginning they were all founded upon measure, the rude
measure of what suited the fingers; and the habit of so marking off
spaces, as time went on, recorded itself in a system, at first simple
as a child’s wit could compass, and afterwards so growing in complexity
as to tax the ingenuity of the most active brains of full-grown
civilized men to master and utilize, and yet at the last nothing more
than a system of finger activity for the covering of holes and the
touching of strings. Thus your musical scales arose. Had Polyphemus had
the ordering of a musical scale, most surely the intervals would have
been considerably larger; he would have suited his own fingers whether
with lengths of strings or with holes in pipes.
Imagine yourself a prehistoric man. How would you set about whistling?
The lips are in the control of the imitative faculty; the effect called
whistling would naturally be first elicited by accident of emotion, or
sensibility of one kind or other. The intent to whistle would arise in
desire to imitate; a chance whistle heard from a shell or hollow nut
or reed would attract attention as for imitation. To imitate, is, as
we know, a propensity of monkeydom. How the human animal shares this
propensity as a characteristic of his race, and how society is based
most differentially upon it,—is not that also taught and recognized in
philosophy?
Beyond the faculty of imitation man possesses that of measuring; he
measures and apportions in his buildings and his bakings: inches and
acres bear relation to each other; he marks off spans and cubits and
inches, and apportions minutely by millet-seeds and barley-corns.
For in earliest times simplest means and methods were as arbitrary
as are now our elaborated mechanisms. It is a truism that music is
ruled by measure, but what I want you to perceive is quite a different
interpretation, and that is that it was the _measuring that ordered the
music_.
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