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Page 25
[02] _Kong_. His disciples called him _Fu Tsee_, or "the
master"; Jesuit missionaries Latinized this to Confucius.
[03] The Chinese theatre has been called an unconscious
parody of our old-fashioned Italian opera, and there
are certainly many resemblances. In a Chinese play,
when the situation becomes tragic, or when one of the
characters is seized with some strong emotion, it finds
vent in a kind of aria. The dialogue is generally given
in the most monotonous manner possible--using only
high throat and head tones, occasionally lowering or
raising the voice on a word, to express emotion. This
monotonous, and to European ears, strangely nonchalant,
nasal recitative, is being continually interrupted by
gong pounding and the shrill, high sound of discordant
reed instruments. When one or more of the characters
commits suicide (which as we know is an honoured custom
in China) he sings--or rather whines--a long chant before
he dies, just as his western operatic colleagues do, as,
for instance, Edgar in "Lucia di Lammermoor" and even,
to come nearer home, Siegfried in "G�tterd�mmerung."
[04] This drum was made of serpents' skins, and the sound of
it was so loud that it could be heard eight miles away.
VI
THE MUSIC OF GREECE
The first name of significance in Greek music is that of
Homer. The hexameters of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" were
quite probably chanted, but the four-stringed lyre which we
associate with the ancient Greek singers was only used for
a few preluding notes--possibly to pitch the voice of the
bard--and not during the chant itself. For whatever melody
this chant possessed, it depended entirely upon the raising
and lowering of the voice according to the accent of the words
and the dramatic feeling of the narrative. For its rhythm
it depended upon that of the hexameter, which consists of
a line of six dactyls and spondees, the line always ending
with a spondee. Really the line should end with a dactyl
([- ' ']) and a spondee ([- -]). If a line ends with two
spondees it is a spondaic hexameter.
From this it would seem that while the pitch of the chant would
be very difficult to gauge, owing to the diversity of opinion as
to how to measure in actual sounds the effect of emotions upon
the human voice, at least the _rhythm_ of the chants would be
well defined, owing to the hexameter in which the latter were
written. Here again, however, we are cast adrift by theory,
for in practice nothing could be more misleading than such a
deduction. For instance, the following lines from Longfellow's
"Evangeline" are both in this metre, although the rhythm of
one differs greatly from that of the other.
Wearing her Norman cap, and her kirtle of blue, and the earrings
and
Shielding the house from storms, on the north were the barns
and the farm-yard.
Now if we think that these lines can be sung to the same
musical rhythm we are very far from the truth, although both
are hexameters, namely,
[- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -]
[- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -]
dactyls, ending with spondee.
Thus we see that metre in verse and rhythm in music are two
different things, although of course they both had the same
origin.
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