The Project Gutenberg eBook, The World's Earliest Music, by Hermann Smith

“The eye is blind when the mind does not see.”—Arab Proverb.

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 ASSYRIA
AND BABYLONIA, TO THE PRIMITIVE
HOME, THE LAND OF AKKAD
AND SUMER.

BY
Hermann Smith.
Author of “The Making of Sound in the Organ,” “Instruments of the
Orchestra from Old to New,” “Modern Organ Tuning,” etc.

Sixty-five Illustrations.

London:
WILLIAM REEVES, 83, CHARING CROSS ROAD, W.C.

Preparing for Publication.

THE
MAKING OF SOUND IN THE ORGAN.
An Analysis of the work of the Air in the Speaking Organ Pipe of
the various constant types, with an Exposition of the Laws of
Time-distance and of the Tone of the Air, etc., etc.,

THE THEORY OF THE AIR-REED ELUCIDATED.

Also

INSTRUMENTS OF THE ORCHESTRA,
THEIR ORIGIN, HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
AND COMPARATIVE ACOUSTICS, etc.

FOREWORD.

A music-trail through many lands, over regions where dwelt the peoples of the earliest civilizations, this I have followed, attracted oftentimes to rambles by the way, gathering evidence on all sides in the course of my journey, picking up whatever seemed to be capable of throwing light upon the early conditions of music; from rock carvings, wall paintings, tablets and vases, marbles and sculpture, papyri and parchments, and records, the treasure-trove and finds of explorers old and new, who seem to have accounted for at least ten thousand years of human experience;—yet withal very few musical instruments of the earlier ages have been recovered, and these for the most part imperfect and unplayable, and we have to depend chiefly upon the ancient representations, drawings or carvings for what we know. Archæologists and antiquarians, unhappily for our quest, have not been very particular in truthfully copying even the drawings and sculptures, often leaving out important details, or supplying some imaginatively; in the absence of insight into the constructive principles of instruments, indifference may be a natural consequence, and that there was anything at all in a musical instrument worth thinking about, might probably never occur to their minds.

Music is not an isolated fact, it is bound up with the lives, with the daily routine of peoples and nations; its courses of development, cannot rightly be judged apart from geography, ethnography, archæology and history. In the early migrations man’s music went with him as his language went, his simple instruments he could fashion by the wayside, and in later eras as men advanced, a craft would organize itself, determining the progress of the instruments from a rude to a refined style of construction; thus a kind of Art would be confirmed and thereout a system of music would arise, which to the people of the time, at whatever stage of attainment considered, would be as mature to them as our present system is to us.

The structure of the instruments defines the possibilities of the music, and my belief is that a true idea of the character of ancient musical display can only be arrived at through a practical knowledge of such structure, its capabilities, its limitations, and the scope of its technique, since the qualities of tone that are at the command of the player are always determined by the means of excitation of the sounds, and by the shape and interior forms of the instruments.

The ancients had no system of harmony, yet there must have been harmony in the air, a promiscuous harmony arising through the variations in a multitude of unisonous effects.

A study of the Double Flutes, the Greek Auloi, has led me to some original conclusions which may or may not be corroborated by future discoveries, and I read with eager hopes of a projected International scheme for the complete excavation of the buried city of Herculanæum, just announced, which, if carried out, may reveal many things that we want to know concerning these mysterious instruments.

Throughout a long life I have been occupied with books and with music, especially with the instruments that make the music, their construction and scientific bearings and relations, practically and experimentally, and thus it has happened that many advantages seldom combined have favoured the pursuit of the investigations discursively related in the present volume.

My thanks are due to Messrs. Cassell and Co., who kindly supplied several blocks, illustrating the Egyptian and Assyrian sections, used by them in Nauman’s “History of Music,” and Dr. J. Stainer’s “Music of the Bible.”

To the Secretary of the Hellenic Society, Mr. J. Penoyre Baker, I am indebted for the photograph of the Apollo of Praxiteles brought by him from Athens, which I use for the frontispiece.

I was agreeably surprised to find that the late Dr. A. S. Murray, Keeper of the Greek and Roman Departments of the British Museum, in his last lectures on Sculpture, delivered by him at Burlington House, but a few weeks before his lamented death, had selected this Praxitelean Monument for the subject of his discourses. Referring to the Apollo Harp he said “it is quite beautiful.” The coincidence of choice attracted me, and calling to mind the learned Keeper’s courteous manner, and kindly help in former years, I had planned another interview, with questions which he from his stores of knowledge would have satisfied—but it was too late—he had passed through The Open Gateway.

Intimations of a proposed sequel to this work will be found in the last two pages of the volume, new and valuable materials having been brought to hand by recent discoveries.

Goethe in his “conversations with Eckermann” said that a book should be judged, first, by the aim the author proposed to himself—next, by the degree in which he had succeeded in accomplishing his aim. I may not have remembered the exact words, “’tis sixty years since” I read them, but the purport of the saying is there. My aim in writing has been to give the lover of music a companionable book, full of information of a kind likely as I think to be of interest to both amateur and professional. My own enthusiasm on the subject has, I hope, been tempered by ease in presentation, for I am wishful that the hours given to the reading of these pages may leave with all readers a pleasant memory.

HERMANN SMITH.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx“The true nature of a thing is whatsoever it becomes when the process of its development is complete.”

Aristotle.

THE WORLD’S EARLIEST MUSIC.

CHAPTER I.

At the Gates of the Past.

THE human interest in the past never dies, its hold upon us increases with the growing years, and every gain that is made to the store of knowledge does but add to the zest with which we search for more; nation vies with nation for the glory of recovering relics of life that are strewn along the path of death.

From the sands and from the tombs, from the paintings and the graven tablets, and from the faces of the rocks we rehabilitate the vision of the mighty dead; a recovered name is a page of a people’s history, and we seek with renewal of eagerness for the pages that should follow or precede.

The long buried spoils of temples and palaces excite the imagination, the grandeur of gold and silver, the wealth of art and ornament, and the resplendent jewels, appeal to the love of power and of possession, active or dormant in every heart; yet not less do we treasure the fragile mementoes, the simplest things, rendered up from the past that were the surroundings of domestic life, that speak to us of the household ways, and of the personal pursuits of the men, and of the adornment of the women who for untold ages have ever sought

“their pleasure in their power to charm.”

The instruments of music that in the remoter ages of the past were in daily use are seldom found, for the nature of the materials of which they were constructed was adverse to their preservation; those that have been found are rarely in their original condition, perfect in all their parts, or suitable for being put to the test of playing, and the resource left to us is to obtain some approximate condition by means of models, and then adapt some modern method for eliciting sound, which method as near as we can judge shall be the counterpart of the original device.

My conviction is that to understand the old music the first necessity is to question the old instruments, that they will best indicate and tell most clearly what the music must have been.

Those “findings” then, the treasure trove of explorers, have great attraction for me, as they have for many other musically-minded people. The archæologist, it is true, is in no degree concerned with their musical import, he is content with their presence as antiquities; paintings and sculpture interest him in many ways as examples of art, and consequently the musical investigator gains by researches which yield him pictures of musical instruments in the using, and representations often in marble and bronze; yet withal I do not imagine that the enlightenment of the musician has been one of the motives influencing the archæologist in his care for the preservation of the treasures recovered from the past. Thus it happens that in published illustrations the details, upon which so much of the teachable value depends, are too often inaccurately carried out, or perhaps it may be are fancifully perfected to accord with some preconceived idea, and thus the student is misled. In museums likewise, there is no little difficulty in obtaining accurate information respecting objects exhibited, and details which are of the first importance, are obscured by some awkwardness in the placing of the objects. The reason for these unintentional hindrances is simple enough: we have but to remember that the antiquarian is not bound to understand the nature of musical instruments, and as a matter of fact he does not understand them.

The two chief lands that hold the music of the past are Egypt and China; yet in how different a manner is the holding of each. Which nation is the ancientist none can tell. East is East, and West is West. From some early birthplace the two people diverged. The people of Egypt have vanished; the people of China remain; they are one fifth of the existing human race. Both people intellectual; yet the brain development of the Chinese has had from its original birth-strain a distinct causation, making its course parallel to that of no other brain. A sport of nature? ask Darwin or the Dragon!

In Egypt we dig and delve and year by year recover the treasures that she holds. In China there is nothing to recover, nothing to dig for, all her past is huddled on the surface. Her music and her musical instruments of the past are here to-day, the same as they ever were, there are no stages of development and no steps of ascent.

Thus the treatment of the question of the earliest music of China is distinct from that of others, and the knowledge of the method of its foundation is to be gathered from the musical instruments still in use.

Chaldæan history extends back to a very remote antiquity. Mr. St. Chad Boscawen, a high authority, states that the working of metal had been practised as early as 3,000 B.C. in Chaldæa, that there are inscriptions certainly as ancient as 4,000 to 5,000 years B.C., and that one of the earliest Chaldæan sculptures contained a representation of the harp and the pipes which were attributed to Jubal. So that we have to go back very far indeed up the stream of time to find the beginnings of music.

That system of music which is the heritage of all the European races comes from the people called the Greeks, but the art as practically pursued by them was lost, or was hidden by an impenetrable cloud.

Lacroix, in his history of “The Arts of the Middle Ages,” describes the condition of the early centuries of our era—one brief passage tells the tale. He says, “Ancient Rome, which had no natural music, readily adapted Greek music, in the time of the emperors, to all the usages of public and private, as of civil and religious, life. Art remained Grecian, and most of the singers and players came from Greece to take service under the wealthy patricians. The various forms of Latin prosody were but thinly disguised beneath a veil of Ionic, Doric, and Lydian melodies, even when the Christians waged a relentless war upon profane music, not only as an accompaniment to the rites of the pagan religion, but as played in the circus and other popular resorts to excite the brutal passions of the multitude, or at the nocturnal orgies of the aristocracy. The decadence and the disappearance of Greek music in Italy and the West date from the reign of Theodosius; and when the games of the Capitol were put down, about the year 384, the Greek musicians either returned to the East or abandoned their art.”

The light of Greece suddenly went out, and darkness surrounds all that relates to the actual characteristics of their musical instruments and their music, notwithstanding the preservation of learned treatises and the citation of numerous historical references. Musicians grope in the dark still, and are unable to realize the musical art of the Greeks. The lyre and the lute and the flute are before us in numberless painted designs, are sculptured in enduring marble,—yet they fail to raise in our minds any adequate idea of the influence of their music upon the national life. The past has closed the gates of the past, and the land beyond awaits the explorer.

Pursuing this line of thought, and taking Greece as the grand junction whence radiate all the lines of musical art up to the present day throughout Europe, we find the pathways that have converged to Greece may be arranged this wise in diagram:

Western Persia.
Chaldæa.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxIndia.
Assyria.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxChina.
Arabia.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxLydia.
Egypt.xxxxxxEtruria.
GREECE.xx

These are the pathways of music, through which Greece derived her knowledge by direct or indirect transmission. On the one hand we can distinctly trace the line back to Chaldæa by way of Egypt; and on the other hand back to Persia, where indeed the origin of the race itself can be looked for. Not in any formal method do I wish this diagram to be understood, for there may have been—and I should infer were—crossings of influence, as between Chaldæa and Arabia, Egypt and India, China and Persia, and so forth. Perhaps another plan of diagram would be by placing Persia central as the source of early tribal dispersion, with sign post pointing in the different directions to Arabia, Chaldæa, India, China. Lydia includes the Asiatic coasts of the Mediterranean. It appears to me that the Chinese influence upon the Greeks was direct by commerce overland; and that in reference to time there was a primitive branching off of the two races from some Persian region.

The ethnological question is too deep for us to judge of, and we can only take the guidance of those who are at this day the recognized authorities. Mr. St. Chad Boscawen traces the Babylonian, the Egyptian, and the Chinese civilizations to the mountainous regions of Western Persia. It will be shown in the chapters on Etruscan lore how Greece derived from Egypt through Etruria before she was in direct constant intercourse with that land, and then subsequently developed her most enduring records of musical art in the hands of the Etruscans. As to China, there may seem at first some difficulty in recognition of influence; but at all events silk from China had penetrated to the Mediterranean before the Greeks knew how it was produced in “far Cathay”; and in the motley gatherings of all peoples and tongues on the coasts of the blue sea, doubtless the representative of the yellow race one day found his way. The Greeks were great travellers; and who can tell where the barrier was fixed that ordered them to turn back.

Persia has left no musical relics, and Mr. A. J. Ellis states: “Of the ancient Persian scale we know nothing, but it was most probably the progenitor of the older Greek.”

The Greeks undoubtedly had an elaborate system of music; but there was no evidence of its practical application to the extent that would have been supposed. Indeed, Pythagoras states that “the intervals in music are rather to be judged intellectually, through numbers, than sensibly through the ear.” The view taken of music by the scholars was demonstrative, and purely on the ground of mathematics. It was altogether apart from popular practice of the art, vocal and instrumental. The philosophers regarded music from the side of morals. In the same way, the Chinese had attained a high degree of knowledge of music in its demonstrable relations, upon which they in their learned treatises eloquently discourse. In demonstrations of the laws of pipes, and in theoretical development of the system of equal temperament, they have displayed their mental grasp; but beyond that the acquired knowledge seems to have made little practical impression. Their philosophers likewise talked of the beneficial influences of music in controlling the passions, and doing other “et cetera” work.

My long tarrying with the musical instruments of Celestials has tended to bring very forcibly before me the great resemblance between the Chinese and the Greek systems of music. Wide asunder as these people are racially, yet in their development of the musical art they seem to have some close kinship, some common source of idea; and little traits of primitive lore constantly give suggestions of some early centre whence the two have diverged, or of some point where in the crossing of the pathways they have supplied themselves from the same fountain, although each traversed in a different direction its appointed course.

The possibilities, however, that I have in mind are of some far earlier impressions from intercourse, how and when constituting the problem; for the Greeks in their prime were but the infants of a day in comparison with the peoples under the great monarchies of Chaldæa, Assyria, Egypt, and China, whose rulers could be traced back two, three, four—aye five—thousand years before the first block was hewn for the foundation of the Parthenon, or ever a Venus stept in marble.

Van Aalst states that “the first invaders of China were a band of immigrants fighting their way among the aborigines, and supposed to have come from the south of the Caspian Sea” and the question remains, where was the earlier track of their wanderings? Is it not also curious that one of the early mythical Kings of ancient Persia had the name Houscheng? It was in his reign that the Persians became Fire Worshippers, adoring flame as the symbol of God.

Yet it is by way of Chaldæa and Egypt that our chief interests will be found, where relics of the musical arts had permanence not granted to them elsewhere. Persia and India yield us less as matter for enquiry, since it is the class of stringed instruments of light kind that their peoples have mostly favoured. Some problems are still left in India which we should like to have solved. The transverse flute is constantly found in ancient carvings in the hands of Krishna, who is popularly believed to have been its inventor; but how it came about that the double flutes should be found on the carvings both of wood and stone awakens curiosity. What historical significance had they? Not a survival of any kind is there in the usage of the present time. Only as it were yesterday, at the British Museum, I was looking over the series of very old carvings in wood,—friezes which have formed the risers of the steps to the Tope at Jumal-Garlic in Afghanistan, crowded with figures of men and women and animals in the uncouth style so characteristic of the land that was the home of Buddha. In these scenes, depicting the history of the great Renunciator, I found amongst the groups of players on instruments several instances of players upon these double pipes, the counterpart of those graven in the historical records of Babylon and Nineveh, and painted on vases by Etruscans, and carved in marble by the Greeks. What does it all mean? How have the races of mankind been affiliated? We find the double flutes in India; we do not find them in China. In that intermediate land of Thibet, has the Grand Lama any evidence or record of them? It is curious that the Chinese, although they have the earlier Pan’s pipes, have neither the double pipes nor the lyre—instruments of Greece—yet they have a system of music essentially the same as the Greeks, and (as will be shown you in the Sheng) a scale consisting of the two conjunct tetrachords, forming with an added tetrachord an octave and a fourth; the key-note being the fourth of the scale, equal to the Mese of the Greeks. The Chinese style of music though lacking the refined ideal of art is on precisely the same lines, vocal with recitative and instrumental interposed phrases; and if the hymns of the old Confucian temple be transcribed side by side with the fragments we have of the worship of Apollo only exacting criticism could determine the different origin. They are equally capable of being harmonized with effective dignity. Further, I would remark also that the Chinese notation, like the Greek, consists solely of added signs written beside the words of the hymn. All the details seem to point to a time in a far distant past when both races were in contact with one source; then came a day of sudden disruption—one race eastward, one race westward: each pursuing its own way. So the years rolled on, bearing their records on two distinct rolls of separate destiny.

The twofold destruction of the vast library of Alexandria by fire, the first time by accident the second time by fanaticism, has been an irreparable loss to music, for there, if anywhere, would have been treasured those records of the learned men of old, which would have told us so much that we want to know.

Now, beyond the paintings and the sculptures, all the knowledge that remains comes to us through the literature of the Greeks, the sole inheritors.

The descent of Music is in direct line from Egypt; and Egypt would in like manner have derived from some earlier civilisation the first elements of her own. There are words in an inscription in the Temple of Dayr-el-Bahari which I think may be taken as shewing Queen Hatasu’s traditional associations of thought in reference to the origin of her race. This famous Queen built that magnificent Temple, and dedicated it in part to Amen the God of Thebes, and in part to Hathor the Beautiful, the Lady of the Western Mountain, the Goddess-Regent of the Land of Punt. Hatasu is represented as suckled by the goddess, who is also the nurse of Horus. In this temple there is a wonderful series of bas-reliefs sculptured and painted on the walls, a panorama in stone of