During the next few centuries the Hebrews became scattered over the world, carrying with them their reverence for God, their love of poetry and song, and their religious customs. These qualities have persisted throughout the centuries, and some of the greatest musicians in the world have been of Hebrew origin.
Although most of the old music has passed away, there is still enough of its spirit left in their temple services to give some idea of the ancient Hebrew music.
From a panel in a Museum (delle Terme) in Rome.
Greek Girl Playing a Double Flute (auloi).
From a frieze in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Greek Boy Playing the Lyre.
CHAPTER IV
The Greeks Lived Their Music—The Romans Used Greek Patterns
The Greeks “dwelt with beauty” and believed it to be a part of being good, and they strove to make everything beautiful. Beauty to the Greeks was a religion. Had this not been so, we would not have the Venus de Milo, the Parthenon in Athens, the Hermes, the Winged Victory (Niké of Samothrace) and all the other Greek masterpieces which no modern sculptor or builder has surpassed.
It is interesting to see a nation 400 years before the time of Christ and even earlier, making glorious art works in stone, and writing the greatest plays the world has ever had, being more grown up than modern nations, and yet as far as we know an infant in the art of music. We have only the slightest idea of how their music sounded as they had no accurate way of writing it, and had only very primitive instruments. Although when compared to their other arts their music was not great, still it was very important to them and they used it constantly with poetry, dancing, and in the drama.
The word music was first used by the Greeks and has been carried into nearly every language; we find musique in French, Musik in German, musica in Italian, and so on.
Music, according to the Greeks, was an art which combined not only the playing of instruments, singing and dancing, but also all the arts and sciences, including mathematics and everything in the universe. It took its name from the Muses, and they believed that it led to the beautiful accord and harmony of the world.
The nine Muses were daughters of Jupiter, and each presided over some particular department of literature, art and science.
Clio: Muse of History and Epic Poetry. She is shown in statues and pictures holding a half open scroll.
Thalia: Muse of Joy and Comedy (drama) with a comic mask in one hand and a crooked staff in the other.
Erato: Muse of Lyric Poetry, inspired those who wrote of love. She plays on a nine-stringed lyre.
Euterpe: Muse of Lyric Song, patroness of music especially of flute players. She holds two flutes (auloi).
Polyhymnia: Muse of Sacred Song. She holds her forefinger to her lips or carries a scroll.
Calliope: Muse of Eloquence and Epic Poetry, holds a roll of parchment, or a trumpet.
Terpsichore: Muse of the Dance, presiding over choral, dance and song. She appears dancing with a seven-stringed lyre.
Urania: Muse of Astronomy, holds the globe and traces mathematical figures with a wand.
Melpomene: Muse of Tragedy (drama), leans on a club and holds a tragic mask.
Myths and Legends
The myths and legends of the ancient Greeks read like fairy tales, but to the Greeks they were what our Bible stories are to us. In their rich mythology we find many stories about the beginnings of music.
To Pan, the god of woods and fields, of flocks and shepherds, is given the credit of inventing the shepherd’s pipe, or Pan’s Pipes. He lived in grottoes, wandered on the mountains and in the valleys, and amused himself hunting, leading the dances of the nymphs, and playing on his pipes.
Pan’s Pipes
A beautiful nymph named Syrinx was loved by Pan, but every time that he tried to tell her of his love, she became frightened and ran away, for Pan was a funny looking lover with goat’s legs, a man’s body, and long pointed ears. One day he chased her through the woods to the bank of a river; she called out in fright, and was suddenly changed by her friends the Water Nymphs, into a clump of tall reeds. When he reached out to embrace her, instead of Syrinx, he had the clump of reeds in his arms! As he sighed in disappointment, his breath passing through the reeds, produced a sad wail. Pan, hearing in it a plaintive song, broke off the reeds in unequal lengths, bound them together, and made the first musical instrument, which he called a syrinx in memory of his lost sweetheart. These pipes comforted Pan, and he played many tender melodies, and often without being seen, was known to be near by his lovely music.
Pan, although adored, was feared. At one time, Brennus, a warrior, with a company of Gauls (a tribe from ancient France), attacked the Temple of Delphi (in Greece), and was about to destroy it, when suddenly they turned and fled in fear although no one pursued them. Their terror was supposed to have been of Pan’s making, and to this day we use the word “panic” (Pan-ic) for all sudden overpowering fright.
Apollo
Pan is supposed to have taught music to Apollo, the god of Music and of the Sun. You have seen statues of him with a lyre in his hands. As Pan’s pupil he learned to play the syrinx so beautifully that he won a prize in a contest with Marsyas, a mortal who played the flute invented (according to the Greek legend), by Pallas Athene. This goddess was sometimes known as Musica or Musician. When Cupid saw her play the flute he laughed at her because she made such queer faces. This angered her, and she flung her flute away. It fell down from Mt. Olympus to the earth, and Marsyas picked it up and became such a skilful player that he challenged the god Apollo to a contest for flute championship of the world! The day came and Apollo won the prize, but put Marsyas to death for daring to challenge him—a god. Apollo afterwards was very sorry and broke all the strings of his lyre and placed it with his flutes in a haunt of Dionysus (god of Wine), to whom he consecrated these instruments.
These stories are not only a part of the ancient Greek religion but they have become, on account of their beauty, a rich source of plot and story for the works of musicians, artists and writers from the days of antiquity to our own time.
Orpheus
One of the favorite Greek stories has been that of Orpheus, who went down to Hades to bring his dead wife whom he adored, back to earth, and about whom Peri, Gluck, and others wrote operas. He was son of Apollo and of Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry, and became such a fine performer on all instruments, that he charmed all things animate and inanimate. He tamed wild birds and beasts, and even the trees and rocks followed him as he played, the winds and the waves obeyed him, and he soothed and made the Dragon, who guarded the Golden Fleece, gentle and harmless.
On the cruise of the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece, Orpheus not only succeeded in launching the boat when the strength of the heroes had failed in the task, but when they were passing the islands of the Sirens, he sang so loudly and so sweetly that the Sirens’ songs could not be heard and the crew were saved.
Music in Their Daily Life
When a people have legends about music you may know that they love it. Such was the case with the Greeks. They did not call their schools high schools and colleges but Music schools, and everything that we call learning they included under the name of music. Every morning the little Greek boy was sent to the Music school where he was taught the things that were considered necessary for a citizen to know. Here he learned gymnastics, poetry, and music. At home too, music was quite as important as in school, and we know that they had folk songs which had to do with the deeds of ordinary life, such as farming and winemaking and grape-picking, and the effect and beauty of the seasons of the year. (See Chap. IX.) They can well be divided into songs of joy and songs of sorrow, and seem to have existed even before Homer the Blind Bard. If you ever have tried to dance or do your daily dozen without music, you will understand at once how much help music always has been to people as they worked.
Harvest Songs
All harvest songs in Greece had the name of Lytiersis. Lytiersis was the son of King Midas, known as the richest king in the world. Lytiersis was a king himself but also a mighty reaper, and according to Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco who has written a book called Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs it was his “habit to indulge in trials of strength with his companions and with strangers who were passing by. He tied the vanquished up in sheaves and beat them. One day he defied an unknown stranger, who proved too strong for him and by whom he was slain.” The first harvest song was composed to console King Midas for the death of his son. We can make a fable from this story which means that Nature and Man are always struggling against each other.
The harvest festivals founded in Greece led to others in Brittany, France, North Germany and England. So does the deed of one race affect other races.
The Liturgies
Among the taxes, or five special liturgies, that the Greeks had to pay, was the obligation for certain rich citizens to supply the Greek tragedies with the chorus. Every Greek play had its chorus and every chorus had to have its structures; a choregic monument to celebrate it; one or more flute players, costumes, crowns, decorations, teachers for the chorus and everything else to make it succeed. This cost, which would equal many thousands of dollars, was undertaken as a duty quite as easily as our men of wealth pay their income taxes. You can see a greatly enlarged copy of a choregic monument, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument at 89th Street and Riverside Drive, in New York City, and also one at the Metropolitan Museum.
In old Greece the musicians were also poets. Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Euripides, Plato, not only wrote their dramas but knew what music should be played with them. In fact no play was complete without its chorus and its music and its flute-player. You have heard of the Greek chorus. Don’t for a moment think it was like our chorus. It consisted of a group of masked actors (all actors in those days wore masks), who appeared between the acts and intoned (chanted) the meaning of the play and subsequent events. In fact the chorus took the place of a libretto,—“words and music of the opera,” for it explained to the audience what it should expect. It spoke and sang some of the most important lines of the play and danced in appropriate rhythms. So it brought together word, action and music, and was a remote ancestor of opera, oratorio and ballet.
Festivals
Besides the occupational songs and those for the drama festivals, the Greeks had the great game festivals where in some, not only competitions in sports took place but also flute playing and singing. The oldest of these festivals was the Olympic games, first held in 776 B.C. and every four years thereafter. These games played so important a part in the lives of the Greeks that their calendar was divided into Olympiads instead of years. While music was evident in the Olympic games, music and poetry were never among the competitions.
The Pythian games were chiefly musical and poetic contests and were started in Delphi, 586 B.C., where they were held every nine years in honor of the Delphian Apollo whose shrine was at Delphi. The Isthmian and Nemean games were also based on poetic and musical contests. Warriors, statesmen, philosophers, artists and writers went to these games and took part in them. Maybe some time we will realize the power of music as did the Greeks nearly one thousand years before the birth of Jesus.
The Greek Scales
While, as we said before, we know very little about the melodies of the Greeks, we do know something about their scales, upon which the church music of the Middle Ages was based, as are our own major and minor scales. In fact the most important contribution Greece made to our music was the scale. They had a very complicated system and no one is quite sure how it worked.
We have the two modes or kinds of scales, major and minor, which we use in different keys, but the Greeks had at least seven different modes used in many different ways. They used one mode for martial or military music, another for funeral ceremonies, another for their temple music, and curiously enough, our own C major scale they used for their popular music, for drinking songs, and light festivities.
The Greek scales were based on tetrachords, from the Greek words tetra-four, chord-string that is, a group of four strings. If you play on the piano B C D E and C D E F and D E F G you will find the three tetrachords that formed the primary modes of the Greeks:—Dorian, Phrygian and Lydian.
Perhaps you have heard in Greek architecture of the Doric column which came from Doria, a province in Greece, and the Ionic column, from Ionia, and so on. In the same way the scales were named for sections of the country from which they first came, Dorian mode, Ionian, Æolian, Phrygian, Lydian, etc.
The Greek tetrachord was formed on the interval of a fourth, for example from E to A—these were called standing tones, because the intervals between the two standing tones or permanent tones could be changed but the first and the fourth always remained the same—
By putting two tetrachords together all the other Greek scales were formed. These fell into two classes, and according to Cecil Forsyth in his History of Music these classes were called the join and the break. When the second tetrachord began on the fourth tone of the first tetrachord, Mr. Forsyth calls it the joining method, thus.
When the second tetrachord began on the tone above the fourth tone of the first tetrachord, he calls it the breaking method, thus:
By using the join and the break with each of the three modes, Dorian, Phrygian and Lydian, you can see to what a great variety of scales and names this would lead. The Greeks spoke of their scales from the top note down, instead of from the lowest note up, as we do.
The first kithara was supposed to have been an instrument of four strings that could be tuned in any of these different ways, with the half-step either between the first and second strings, or between the second and third, or between the third and fourth. Two instruments tuned differently formed the complete scale, but it did not take long to add strings to their lyres and kitharas so that they could play an entire scale on one instrument.
The little Greek boy was taught in school to tune the scale according to the fourth string of his lyre, which was the home tone or what we should call tonic. Our tonic falls on the first degree of the scale, but in the primary modes of the Greeks, the tonic fell on the fourth degree, and was called the final. When the final was on pitch all the other strings had to be tuned to it.
These tetrachords are supposed to have been perfected by Terpander, in the six hundreds before Christ. His melodies were called nomes and were supposed to have had a fine moral effect on the Spartan youth in giving him spirit and courage. The Greeks thought that all music and that every one of their modes had a special effect on conduct and character.
After the Messenian war, Sparta was in such a state of upheaval that the Delphian oracle was consulted. The answer was:
So the Spartans called upon Terpander to help them, and through the power of his song all was peace again.
Terpander collected Asiatic, Egyptian, Æolian and Bœotian melodies all of which are unfortunately lost; he invented a new notation and enlarged the kithara from four strings to seven. Arion, Alcæus and the great poetess Sappho were his pupils, and Sappho is often shown in statues with a six stringed kithara.
Most of these poet singers were called “lyric poets” because they sang to the accompaniment of the lyre.
Pythagoras
The Greeks were the first to write down their music, or to make a musical notation whereby the singers and players knew what tones to use. Their system was their alphabet with certain alterations. They had names describing each tone not unlike our use of the word tonic for the first degree of the scale, and dominant for the fifth and so on.
Of course they did not have the staff and treble and bass clefs as we have, but they were groping for some way of recording music in those far away days.
Pythagoras as far back as 584–504 B.C., not only influenced the music in the classical Greek period (400 B.C.), but down to and throughout the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (1500s). To this day music is based on his mathematical discovery. He worked out a theory of numbers based on the idea that all nature was governed by the law of numbers and modern scientists have proven that he was correct in many of his ideas. In fact our orchestras and pianos are tuned in accordance with his theories.
He invented an instrument called the monochord which consisted of a hollow wooden box with one string and movable fret. He discovered that when he divided the string exactly in half by means of the fret, the tone produced was an octave higher than the tone given out by striking the entire string; one-third of the string produced the interval of a fifth above the octave; one-fourth the length of the string produced a fourth above the fifth; one-fifth produced a third (large or major) above the fourth; one-sixth produced a third (small or minor); one-seventh produced a slightly smaller third and one-eighth produced a large second, three octaves above the sound of the entire string:
The truth of Pythagoras’ theory of tone relationship has been proven by an experiment in physics showing that all of the above tones belong to the same tone family. An amusing experiment can be made by pressing silently any one of the tones marked 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 8, and striking the fundamental tone sharply, the key you are pressing silently will sound so that you can distinctly hear its pitch.
The Greeks seem to have had no harmony (that is, combining of two or more tones in chords) outside of the natural result of men’s voices and women’s singing together. But they had groups of singers answering each other in what is called antiphony (anti-against, phony-sound). Even our American Indians have their song leader and chorus answering each other.
Greek rhythm followed the rhythm of the spoken word and was considered a part of their poetic system.
Greek Instruments
We have already spoken of the syrinx, Pan’s Pipes, the instrument of Pan, the satyrs and of the shepherds; the monochord, Pythagoras’ invention; the lyre and kithara; and the flute or aulos.
The lyre, of the family of stringed instruments, was the Greek national instrument. It was the first to be used in their musical competitions, and helped in the forming of the Greek modes. These were of two types, the lyre and the kithara. The first lyres which came down from the age of myths and fables were originally made of the shell of a tortoise and had four strings (the tetrachord) and later seven and even more strings. This form of the lyre was called chelys, or the tortoise, and was used for accompanying drinking songs and popular love songs.
The kithara was also called lyre, but was not made of the body of the tortoise, and it became the Greek concert instrument, and was only used by professionals, while the chelys was used in the home. It came originally from Asia Minor and Egypt. It had four strings at first but these were gradually added to, until there were fifteen and eighteen strings. It was sometimes small and sometimes large, and was held to the body by means of a sling and was played with a plectrum or pick.
The Greek flute or aulos was a wood-wind instrument more like our oboe than our flute. It was usually played in pairs, that is, one person played two flutes or auloi of different sizes at one time, and they were V shaped. There was a group of auloi differing in range like the human voice differs, and covering three octaves from the bass aulos to the soprano.
The aulos was first a single wooden pipe with three or four finger holes which later were increased to fifteen or sixteen so that the three modes Dorian, Phrygian and Lydian, could be played on one pair of auloi. About six centuries before the Christian era, the double flute became the instrument of the Delphian and Pythian musical competitions.
In the chorus too, we read that for each drama there was a special aulos soloist who always played the double flute.
There were other type instruments such as the war trumpets, trumpets used in the temple services, and harps (magadis) that were brought from Egypt, but the real instruments of the Greeks pictured in their sculpture and on their vases and urns, and spoken of in their literature, are the lyres and auloi.
Roman Music
The Romans, law givers, world conquerors and road builders, gave little new to music, for they did not show a great talent for art. They were influenced by Greek ideals and Greek methods. They were warlike by nature, and from defenders of their state they became conquerors. As they grew nationally stronger and more secure, they learned music, oratory, architecture and sculpture from Greek teachers. Many Romans well known in history were singers and gifted players on the Greek kithara, lyre, and flute (aulos).
The Romans seemed to have cared more about the performing of music than for the composing of it, and “offered prizes to those who had the greatest dexterity, could blow the loudest or play the fastest.” (Familiar Talks on History of Music.—Gantvoort.)
As they come to America today the musicians of other lands flocked to Rome, especially those who played or sang, because they were received with honor and were richly paid.
The Romans, among them Boethius (6th century B.C.), wrote treatises on the Greek modes, were very much interested in the theory of music, and built their scales like the Greeks. To each of the seven tones within an octave they gave the name of a planet, and to every fourth tone which was the beginning of a new tetrachord, the name of a day of the week which is named for the planet.
| B | C | D | E | F | G | A |
| Saturn | Jupiter | Mars | Sun | Venus | Mercury | Moon |
| Saturday | Sunday | Monday | ||||
| B | C | D | E | F | G | A |
| Saturn | Jupiter | Mars | Sun | Venus | Mercury | Moon |
| Tuesday | Wednesday | |||||
| B | C | D | E | F | G | A |
| Saturn | Jupiter | Mars | Sun | Venus | Mercury | Moon |
| Thursday | Friday |
The days of the week in French show much more clearly than in English the names of the planets, in the case of Tuesday—mardi, (Mars); Wednesday—mercredi (Mercury); Thursday—jeudi, (Jupiter); Friday—vendredi, (Venus).
The Greeks brought their instrument, the kithara, to Rome, and with it a style of song called a kitharoedic chant, which was usually a hymn sung to some god or goddess. The words, until three hundred years after the birth of Jesus, were in the Greek language; the Latin kitharoedic songs like those of the poets Horace and Catullus were sung at banquets and private parties, Cicero too, was musical.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Chinese Instruments.
Fig. 5.—Trumpets.
Fig. 6.—Te’ch’ing—sonorous stone.
Fig. 7.—Yang-Ch’in or Dulcimer.
Fiddles from Arabia (Fig. 8, Rebab); Japan (Fig. 9, Kokin); Corea (Fig. 10, Haggrine) and Siam (Fig. 11, See Saw Duang).
Edward MacDowell in Critical and Historical Essays, says that instrumental music was no longer used merely to accompany voices and had become quite independent. The flute (aulos) players performed better than the lyre and kithara players and were liked better. They played “dressed in long feminine, saffron (yellow)-colored robes, with veiled faces, and straps around their cheeks to support the muscles of the mouth.” They played with an astonishing amount of technical skill. “Even women became flute players, although this was considered disgraceful.” The prices paid to these flute players were higher than the amounts received by our opera singers.
The Roman theatre, unlike the Greek, was not a place to honor their gods. Greek plays, both tragedy and comedy, were replaced with pantomime, usually accompanied by orchestra and singing. The orchestra was made up of “cymbals, gongs, castanets, foot castanets, rattles, flutes, bagpipes, gigantic lyres, and a kind of shell or crockery cymbals, which were clashed together.”
The Roman tibia or bagpipe is still popular today with the peasants of Italy. Although the bagpipe is first mentioned in Rome, there are some Persian terra cotta figures made before the Roman era, showing players of the bagpipes. It is always said that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned and even our motion pictures show him playing the violin to the accompaniment of flames. How could he have played on a violin when it had not as yet been invented? If he played any instrument while Rome burned, it was probably the tibia.
CHAPTER V
The Orientals Make Their Music—Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Burmese, and Javanese
To hear two Chinamen exchanging greetings on a street corner, you would think they were singing or rather chanting, not because their tones are particularly pleasant for they are high and nasal and hard, but because they are talking in their own peculiar way. The Chinese have what is called an inflected language in which they use many tones. For example the syllable “hi” in one tone will mean one thing and it will mean something else entirely in each different inflection. Here again is a case where it is hard to say where speech ends and song begins. Another amusing thing about the Chinese is the way, according to our ideas, they seem to twist every thing around, so that what we call high tones they call low tones; they wear white for mourning and we wear black; their guests of honor sit at the left of the host and ours sit at the right; they consider taking off the hat very bad manners and of course we consider it bad manners for a man to keep it on in the house or when talking to a lady.
They never used their music as a way of expressing beauty as other nations have done, but treated it as we would a problem in arithmetic or a cross-word puzzle, and they loved to write articles on the subject that would seem long and dull to us. However, as far back as 2255 B.C. Ta Shao composed a piece of music which Confucius, 1600 years later, said, “enchanted him to such an extent that he did not know the taste of food for months.”
After a print by Gakutei—about 1840.
The Koto-Player.
After print by Kuniyasu—about 1830.
The Wandering Samisen-Player.
Scales
Their scale was the pentatonic and they had the queerest names for their degrees or steps.
| F | the | first | degree | was | called | Emperor |
| G | „ | 2d | „ | „ | „ | Prime Minister |
| A | „ | 3d | „ | „ | „ | Loyal Subjects |
| C | „ | 4th | „ | „ | „ | Affairs of State |
| D | „ | 5th | „ | „ | „ | Mirror of the World |
This shows that music must have been limited to a very few subjects.
When the scale of five steps was changed into a scale of seven steps about 600 B.C., every one thought that the end of music had come. However these two new notes B and E which formed half steps in the scale were given very interesting names: Leader and Mediator. We, today, call B the leading tone, and E the mediant, so in this case, the Chinese were not quite so topsy-turvy as usual. But in true Chinese fashion they thought that a mythical bird Fung-Woang and his mate had invented the steps and the half steps. The whole steps to them stood for perfect and independent things such as heaven, sun and man; the half steps stood for dependent things such as earth, moon and woman.
They had 84 scales! Think of that and be happy! For we have only two modes, major and minor, and twelve different sounding scales in each.
We get very little pleasure out of Chinese melodies for they seem to wander about aimlessly and do not end comfortably, nor do they seem to begin anywhere! The best melodies are found among the oldest sacred music and among the songs of the sailors and mountaineers. The sacred hymns and the songs of the people have come down unchanged from earliest times. The music of their theatres we like least of all as it is sing-sing, shrill and nerve racking.
Here is an example of an ancient hymn in the pentatonic scale:
Instruments
How the Chinese like noise! Their orchestras are seventy-five percent noise makers: drums of all kinds and sizes, bells, stones beaten with mallets, cymbals, wooden clappers, a row of tuned stones and copper plates strung up to be hammered, and wooden tubs beaten sometimes from the inside and sometimes from the outside. They also have wind instruments of clay and flutes of bamboo and metal. The cheng, their most pleasing wind instrument, is made of a hollow gourd with bamboo tubes of different lengths inserted. Their most popular stringed instruments are the kin, a primitive guitar, and the cha, a sort of large zither with twenty-five strings. These instruments date back to barbaric times.
One of the most curious that we have come across is the king which is supposed to have been invented by Quei, a mythical youth like the Greek Orpheus. It is a rack hung with two rows of sixteen different sized stones, which are struck with a wooden mallet. This instrument goes back to 2300 B.C. It seemed so important to the Chinese that they have a special kind of king called the nio-king upon which only the Emperor could play. Another little instrument almost as queer as the king, made of slats of wood tied together and shaped like a fan, used to beat time, was called the tchoung-tou. It was held in one hand and struck against the palm of the other much as one would play with a fan.
In making their instruments, the Chinese used eight different sounds in nature which they found musical—the sound of skin (drums), stone (king and nio-king), metal (flutes, bells, gongs, cymbals and trumpets), clay (instrument like an ocarina moulded into fantastic animal shapes), wood (drums and boxes), bamboo (flutes and parts of the cheng), silk (strings on the che and king and other stringed instruments), gourds (sound boards which held the tubes of the cheng, one of the ancestors of the modern organ).
As early as the 5th century B.C., one of the first books on music in the world was written by a friend of Confucius, the great teacher and philosopher. We know about the ancient Chinese music, not from hieroglyphics and parchments, but from the music they use today, which is the same as that of barbaric times. The law against new things prevailed there as it did in Egypt, and where the government controls art, there can be little progress.
However we might have known much more about music had not Emperor She Huang-Ti “the book destroyer” ordered all musical instruments and books to be destroyed (246 B.C.) except those about medicine, agriculture and magic. For generations after, the people heard little music but the noise of tumbling bells and dancers’ drums.
Their popular music has always been very poor with no particular form or system.
Japanese Music
From the many Japanese prints, and cups and bowls decorated with fascinating pictures of the dainty little men and women playing the samisen and koto, we feel as if we had met these far away people before.
The koto and the samisen have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. It is said that the koto was first made of several hunting bows placed side by side and that later they were joined together as one long sounding board across which the strings were drawn. In the prints we see the long zither-like instruments lying flat on the floor and the dainty little players in fancy kimonos beside them.
Perhaps in the same print a companion will be seen playing a samisen, a long necked instrument whose strings are plucked with a pick or plectrum, such as we use for the mandolin. Whether these prints are a hundred years old or the work of an artist today, makes little difference, for we find the instrument unchanged and the little player in the same lovely kimono. These instruments have been in use in Japan for hundreds of years.
The music and instruments of the Japanese are very like those of the Chinese, not only because they are of like race, but because the Japanese are great imitators and have borrowed from China not only music but art. The Japanese love music for itself, not as the Chinese love it as subject for debate, but they have not written any better music than their neighbors on the mainland.
If you have listened to the music of Madame Butterfly, an opera by Giacomo Puccini, you will have heard a number of Japanese melodies, some of which are real. The composers of Europe and America love to imitate the oriental music because it gives them a chance to make effects quite different from those possible in our own music. Besides, the oriental people seem very picturesque to us and stir our imagination. Henry Eichheim of Boston has written Chinese and Japanese Impressions in which he has used many of the native instruments,—bells, rattles and drums.
The Japanese have great love of beauty which shows itself in their festivals, held in the spring when the cherry trees blossom and azaleas bloom. Then, too, their Geisha dances are full of grace and have the most winning names, such as, Leaf of Gold and the Butterfly dance. At the time of the festivals bands of musicians and dancers rove from place to place in gay costumes and add greatly to the fun. The Geisha girls are trained to sing and dance to the accompaniment of the koto and samisen to amuse the people.
The Japanese and Chinese are Buddhists, or worshippers of the prophet Buddha. In their temples they chant the whole service on one note accompanied by the sound of cymbals and the tolling of a deep rich gong. We know these gongs for we have often been called to dinner by them in America.
About 200 years ago a musician named Yatsubashi, the father of Japanese national music, invented a way of writing down music for the koto. Each string has a number and this number is set down and is read from top to bottom instead of from left to right on the staff, as we read music.
Of late years Japan has been interested in European customs and has adopted so many of them that they are called the “Frenchmen of the East.” Among other things that they imitate is our musical system. So today they have symphony concerts and piano and song recitals in which they hear European artists and they themselves perform music of our composers. They send many of their young people to Europe and America to study music. This may lead to discarding their own music in time even as they are giving up the kimono, for our less picturesque costume.