The World's Earliest Music. Hermann Smith

      Fig. 2. Ancient Greek players on Flute and Pan’s pipes.

      The Pan’s pipes as a musical instrument made its mark in history; in almost every land in some form or other it has existed as a popular instrument, and therefore a source of pleasure. Varied in form, and with pipes few or many, it is found on ancient sculptures and in paintings. Europe, Asia, Africa, and America show specimens of the instrument ancient, and often modern; for the use survives among some people not yet spoilt by premature civilization. The British Museum possesses a very peculiar specimen made of stone, which was found in Central America. Another, of which there is a cast in the Berlin Museum, was discovered placed over a corpse in a Peruvian tomb; it was made of a greenish stone, a kind of talc, and had eight pipes which gave their notes as in ancient days.

Fig. 3 Ancient Peruvian Stone Syrinx.

      The British Museum possesses an interesting relic from a tomb at Arica; this Peruvian huaraya puhura consists of fourteen reed pipes of a brownish colour tied together in two rows, so as to form a double set of seven reeds; both sets are of the same dimensions and are placed side by side, one set being open at the bottom, and the other set being closed, consequently capable of producing octaves to the open set; a remarkable feature therefore is the presence of the open set, indicating a clear perception of the musical relations of the two distinct forms used.

      The Chinese also have their example in the instrument they call “The Outspread Phœnix” or the sacred bird, to them the outward symbol of some myth that had credence from immemorial times.

Fig. 4. Peruvian Pan’s Pipes, Double Set.

From a Tomb in Arica.

      Whether there has been a migration of races and heritage of primitive invention, or whether with each people the Pan’s pipes had spontaneously originated, is a problem upon which curiosity cannot fail to be awakened when it is noticed how these instruments, almost identical in make and shape, are found all over the world (see forward “In the Land of China.”)

      The Chinese instrument is an assemblage of pipes of various lengths from which musical tones of different pitches are produced—it is a mouth organ. Our modern organ is likewise an assemblage of pipes, and differs only from it in respect of number and degree. Perhaps the blowing across the open end of a pipes was the earliest mechanical way of producing a flute sound. The little river reed pipe of Pan is therefore selected as the type of all flutes; the principle is the same whatever the variation in method of sounding.

      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.

      Those who, seeing the holes that are cut upon a common flute, or oboe, consider that in the origin of the instrument they were so done in order fitly to comport with a musical scale, are wrong in their supposition.

      In the primitive making of a flute the holes were cut to suit the spread of the fingers, and the scales which followed as the result of the placing the holes, were accepted by primitive man; the ear got to like the sequence of sounds, and it so worked into the brain of the race, that ages after, it became an intellectually accepted musical scale, or relation of notes and was varied by evolution; the structure of the organ of hearing is the same in every race, so far as we can ascertain, and the same natural laws are obeyed in its exercise. Different races, however, have developed the hearing ear differently as to its choice, because primitively, in the setting out of their instruments there were differences of relation. The lengths of the strings, and the distances of the holes spaced for the convenience of the fingers, ordained the musical scales. Contrast the music of the European and the Asiatic races. Our so-called divine music is to the Chinese miserable, unscientific stuff; and the sounds which please Asiatics as entrancing music, are to us distracting din, positively painful to listen to. The liking of the ear in music is a liking by inheritance, transmitted as a facial type is.

      The fingers are the fates of the musical art. Curiously enough, six fingers have been the chief arbiters of the nature of man’s music; and yet how long it was before that number was brought into use. Earliest pipe instruments seem to have employed only two fingers; then the thumb was made available, after that the third finger, and at last the little finger was brought into service; it was, however, the period of the ruling of the six fingers, three of each hand, in which the scales were laid, and the art of music developed. In the stringed instruments there is evidence of similar advance from one string to many. Men learnt slowly the marvellous capacities of the lissome fingers they possess.

      We should see a meaning and a purpose in each change and variation in the shape and adaptation of instruments. It may strike you somewhat strangely that you should be set thinking of bits of wood, and pipes and strings, as being aforetime the actual music makers, moulding in fixed forms our musical tendencies. You fancy they are our servants, unaware that they have ruled us earlier than we have ruled them.

      My conclusion, curious as it may seem, is put forth seriously, after much study and after long inquisitive looking into things,