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Page 6
It is said that first impressions are the strongest and most
lasting; certain it is that humanity, through all its social and
racial evolutions, has retained remnants of certain primitive
ideas to the present day. The army death reveille, the minute
gun, the tolling of bells for the dead, the tocsin, etc., all
have their roots in the attributes assigned to the primitive
drum; for, as I have already pointed out, the more civilized
a people becomes, the more the word-symbols degenerate. It
is this continual drifting away of the word-symbols from the
natural sounds which are occasioned by emotions that creates
the necessity for auxiliary means of expression, and thus
gives us instrumental music.
Since the advent of the drum a great stride toward civilization
had been made. Mankind no longer lived in caves but built huts
and even temples, and the conditions under which he lived
must have been similar to those of the natives of Central
Africa before travellers opened up the Dark Continent to the
caravan of the European trader. If we look up the subject in
the narratives of Livingstone or Stanley we find that these
people lived in groups of coarsely-thatched huts, the village
being almost invariably surrounded by a kind of stockade. Now
this manner of living is identically the same as that of all
savage tribes which have not passed beyond the drum state
of civilization, namely, a few huts huddled together and
surrounded by a palisade of bamboo or cane. Since the pith
would decompose in a short time, we should probably find that
the wind, whirling across such a palisade of pipes--for that is
what our bamboos would have turned to--would produce musical
sounds, in fact, exactly the sounds that a large set of Pan's
pipes would produce. For after all what we call Pan's pipes
are simply pieces of bamboo or cane of different lengths tied
together and made to sound by blowing across the open tops.
The theory may be objected to on the ground that it scarcely
proves the antiquity of the pipe to be less than that of the
drum; but the objection is hardly of importance when we consider
that the drum was known long before mankind had reached the
"hut" stage of civilization. Under the head of pipe, the
trumpet and all its derivatives must be accepted. On this point
there has been much controversy. But it seems reasonable to
believe that once it was found that sound could be produced
by blowing across the top of a hollow pipe, the most natural
thing to do would be to try the same effect on all hollow
things differing in shape and material from the original
bamboo. This would account for the conch shells of the Amazons
which, according to travellers' tales, were used to proclaim
an attack in war; in Africa the tusks of elephants were used;
in North America the instrument did not rise above the whistle
made from the small bones of a deer or of a turkey's leg.
That the Pan's pipes are the originals of all these species
seems hardly open to doubt. Even among the Greeks and Romans
we see traces of them in the double trumpet and the double
pipe. These trumpets became larger and larger in form, and
the force required to play them was such that the player
had to adopt a kind of leather harness to strengthen his
cheeks. Before this development had been reached, however,
I have no doubt that all wind instruments were of the Pan's
pipes variety; that is to say, the instruments consisted of a
hollow tube shut at one end, the sound being produced by the
breath catching on the open edge of the tube.
Direct blowing into the tube doubtless came later. In
this case the tube was open at both ends, and the sound
was determined by its length and by the force given to the
breath in playing. There is good reason for admitting this new
instrument to be a descendant of the Pan's pipes, for it was
evidently played by the nose at first. This would preclude
its being considered as an originally forcible instrument,
such as the trumpet.
Now that we have traced the history of the pipe and considered
the different types of the instrument, we can see immediately
that it brought no great new truth home to man as did the drum.
The savage who first climbed secretly to the top of the
stockade around his village to investigate the cause of the
mysterious sounds would naturally say that the Great Spirit
had revealed a mystery to him; and he would also claim to be
a wonder worker. But while his pipe would be accepted to a
certain degree, it was nevertheless second in the field and
could hardly replace the drum. Besides, mankind had already
commenced to think on a higher plane, and the pipe was reduced
to filling what gaps it could in the language of the emotions.
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