The World's Earliest Music. Hermann Smith
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musical instruments and their music, notwithstanding the preservation of learned treatises and the citation of numerous historical references.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