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Page 23
From a technical point of view, the instruments of bamboo attain
an importance above all other Chinese instruments. According
to the legend, the Pan's-pipes of bamboo regulated the tuning
of all other instruments, and as a matter of fact the pipe
giving the note F, the universal tonic, is the origin of
all measures also. For this pipe, which in China is called
the "musical foot," is at the same time a standard measure,
holding exactly twelve hundred millet seeds, and long enough
for one hundred millet seeds to stand end on end within it.
In concluding this consideration of the music of the
Chinese, I would draw attention to the unceasing repetition
which constitutes a prominent feature in all barbarous or
semi-barbarous music. In the "Hymn of the Ancestors" this
endless play on three or four notes is very marked.
[Figure 02]
In other songs it is equally apparent.
[Figure 03] etc.
[Figure 04]
[Figure 05] etc.
This characteristic is met with in the music of the American
Indians, also in American street songs, in fact in all music of
a primitive nature, just as our school children draw caricatures
similar to those made by great chiefs and medicine men in the
heart of Africa, and, similarly, the celebrated "graffiti"
of the Roman soldiers were precisely of the same nature as
the beginnings of Egyptian art. In art, the child is always
a barbarian more or less, and all strong emotion acting on
a naturally weak organism or a primitive nature brings the
same result, namely, that of stubborn repetition of one idea.
An example of this is Macbeth, who, in the very height of his
passion, stops to juggle with the word "sleep," and in spite
of the efforts of his wife, who is by far the more civilized
of the two, again and again recurs to it, even though he
is in mortal danger. When Lady Macbeth at last breaks down,
she also shows the same trait in regard to her bloodstained
hands. It is not so far from Scotland to the Polar regions,
and there we find that when Kane captured a young Eskimo and
kept him on his ship, the only sign of life the prisoner gave
was to sing over and over to himself the following:
[Figure 06]
Coming back again to civilization, we find Tennyson's Elaine, in
her grief, repeating, incessantly the words, "Must I then die."
The music of the Siamese, Burmese, Javanese, and Japanese has
much in common with that of the Chinese, the difference between
the first two and the last named being mainly in the absence
of the _king_, or musical stones, or rather the substitution
of sets of drums in place of it. For instance, the Burmese
drum-organ, as it is called, consists of twenty-one drums
of various sizes hung inside a great hoop. Their gong-organ
consists of fifteen or more gongs of different sizes strung
inside a hoop in the same manner. The player takes his place
in the middle of the hoop and strikes the drums or gongs
with a kind of stick. These instruments are largely used in
processions, being carried by two men, just as a sedan chair is
borne; the player, in order to strike all the gongs and bells,
must often walk backwards, or strike them behind his back.
In Javanese and Burmese music these sets of gongs and drums are
used incessantly, and form a kind of high-pitched, sustained
tone beneath which the music is played or sung.
In Siamese music the wind instruments have a prominent
place. After having heard the Siamese Royal Orchestra a number
of times in London, I came to the conclusion that the players
on the different instruments _improvise_ their parts, the only
rule being the general character of the melodies to be played,
and the finishing together. The effect of the music was that
of a contrapuntal nightmare, hideous to a degree which one who
has not heard it cannot conceive. Berlioz, in his "Soir�es de
l'orchestre," well described its effect when he said:
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