codified into human speech it does not give any raw material for art, yet so powerful are its primitive effects that music (in the bird-song sense of sound indulged in for its own attractiveness) is as long prior to language as the brilliant colours of animals and flowers are prior to painting (see Song). Again, sound as a warning or a menace is eminently important in the history of the instinct of self-preservation; and, above all, its production is instantaneous and instinctive.
All these facts, while they tend to make musical expression an early phenomenon in the history of life, are extremely unfavourable to the early development of musical art. They invested the first musical attempts with a mysterious power over listener and musician, by re-awakening instincts more powerful, because more ancient and necessary, than any that could ever have been appealed to by so deliberate a process as that of drawing on a flat surface a series of lines calculated to remind the eye of the appearance of solid objects in space. It is hardly surprising that music long remained as imperfect as its legendary powers were portentous, even in the hands of so supremely artistic a race as that of classical Greece; and whatever wonder this backwardness might still arouse in us vanishes when we realize the extreme difficulty of the process by which the principles of the modern art were established.
2. Non-harmonic and Greek Music.—Archaic music is of two kinds—the unwritten, or spontaneous, and the recorded, or scientific. The earliest musical art-problems were far too difficult for conscious analysis, but by no means always beyond the reach of a lucky hit from an inspired singer; and thus folk music often shows real beauty where the more systematic music of the time is merely arbitrary. Moreover, folk-music and the present music of barbarous and civilized non-European races furnish the study of musical origins with material analogous to that given by the present manners and customs of different races in the study of social evolution and ancient history. We may mention as examples the accurate comparison of the musical scales of non-European races undertaken by A. J. Ellis (On the Musical Scales of Various Nations, 1885); the parallel researches and acute and cautious reasoning of his friend and collaborator, A. J. Hipkins (Dorian and Phrygian reconsidered from a Non-harmonic Point of View, 1902); and, perhaps most of all, the study of Japanese music, with its remarkable if uncertain signs of the beginning of a harmonic tendency, its logical coherence, and its affinity to Western scales, points in which it seems to show a great advance upon the Chinese music from which most of it is derived (Music and Musical Instruments of Japan, by J. F. Piggott, 1893). The reader will find detailed accounts of ancient Greek music in the article on that subject in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (new ed., ii. 223) and in Monro’s Modes of Ancient Greek Music (Clarendon Press, 1894), while both the Greek music itself, and the steps by which it passed through Graeco-Roman and early Christian phases to become the foundation of the modern art, are traced as clearly as is consistent with accuracy in The Oxford History of Music, vol. i., by Professor Wooldridge. Sir Hubert Parry’s Evolution of the Art of Music (“International Scientific Series,” originally published under the title of The Art of Music) presents the main lines of the evolution of modern musical ideas in the clearest and most readable form yet attained.
Sir Hubert Parry illustrates in this work the artificiality of our modern musical conceptions by the word “cadence,” which to a modern musician belies its etymology, since it normally means for him no “falling” close but a pair of final chords rising from dominant to tonic. Moreover, in consequence of our harmonic notions we think of scales as constructed from the bottom upwards; and even in the above-mentioned article in Grove’s Dictionary all the Greek scales are, from sheer force of habit, written upwards. But the ancient and, almost universally, the primitive idea of music is like that of speech, in which most inflections are in fact cadences, while rising inflexions express less usual sentiments, such as surprise or interrogation. Again, our modern musical idea of “high” and “low” is probably derived from a sense of greater and less vocal effort; and it has been much stimulated by our harmonic sense, which has necessitated a range of sounds incomparably greater than those employed in any non-harmonic system. The Greeks derived their use of the terms from the position of notes on their instruments; and the Greek hypatē was what we should call the lowest note of the mode, while netē was the highest. Sir George Macfarren has pointed out (Ency. Brit., 9th ed., art. “Music”) that Boethius (c. A.D. 500) already fell into the trap and turned the Greek modes upside down.[1]
Another radical though less grotesque misconception was also already well exploded by Macfarren; but it still frequently survives at the present day, since the study of non-harmonic scales is, with the best of intentions, apt rather to encourage than to dispel it. The more we realize the importance of differences in position of intervals of various sizes, as producing differences of character in scales, the more irresistible is the temptation to regard the ancient Greek modes as differing from each other in this way. And the temptation becomes greater instead of less when we have succeeded in thinking away our modern harmonic notions. Modern harmonization enormously increases the differences of expression between modes of which the melodic intervals are different, but it does this in a fashion that draws the attention almost entirely away from these differences of interval; and without harmony we find it extremely difficult to distinguish one mode from another, unless it be by this different arrangement of intervals. Nevertheless, all the evidence irresistibly tends to the conclusion that while the three Greek genera—diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic—were scales differing in intervals, the Greek modes were a series of scales identical in arrangement of interval, and differing, like our modern keys, only in pitch. The three genera were applied to all these modes or keys, and we have no difficulty in understanding their modifying effects. But the only clue we have to the mental process by which in a preharmonic age different characteristics can be ascribed to scales identical in all but pitch, is to be found in the limited compass of Greek musical sounds, corresponding as it does to the evident sensitiveness of the Greek ear to differences in vocal effort. We have only to observe the compass of the Greek scale to see that in the most esteemed modes it is much more the compass of speaking than of singing voices. Modern singing is normally at a much higher pitch than that of the speaking voice, but there is no natural reason, outside the peculiar nature of modern music, why this should be so. It is highly probable that all modern singing would strike a classical Greek ear as an outcry; and in any case such variations of pitch as are inconsiderable in modern singing are extremely emphatic in the speaking voice, so that they might well make all the difference to an ear unaccustomed to organized sound beyond the speaking compass. Again, much that Aristoxenus and other ancient authorities say of the character of the modes (or keys) tends to confirm the view that that character depends upon the position of the mese or keynote within the general compass. Thus Aristotle (Politics, v. (viii.) 7, 1342 b. 20) states that certain low-pitched modes suit the voices of old men, and thus we may conjecture that even the position of tones and semitones might in the Dorian and Phrygian modes bring the bolder portion of the scale in all three genera into the best regions of the average young voice, while the Ionian and Lydian might lead the voice to dwell more upon semitones and enharmonic intervals, and so account for the heroic character of the former and the sensual character of the latter (Plato, Republic, 398 to 400).
Of the Greek genera, the chromatic and enharmonic (especially
- ↑ It is worth adding that in the 16th century the great contrapuntal composer Costanzo Porta had been led by doubts on the subject to the wonderful conclusion that ancient Greek music was polyphonic, and so constructed as to be invertible; in illustration of which theory he and Vincentino composed four-part motets in each of the Greek genera (diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic), Porta’s being constructed like the 12th and 13th fugues in Bach’s Kunst der Fuge so as to be equally euphonious when sung upside down! (See Hawkins’s History of Music, i. 112.)
