The World's Earliest Music. Hermann Smith
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.
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