Scan 53
Musical Courier 1894-11-21: Vol 29 Iss 767, 1894
24 lines. Read by computer on 20 September 2026. Printed page 46. See the scan on archive.org.
1nant logs is frequent among all Indian families. In New Mexico the great religious dances are accompanied by their music. Navajo Indians sometimes use two logs of different pitch, and are said to get more music out of them than is played on a "snake flute" it appeals so irresistibly to the musical taste of the serpent that he is temporarily bereft of his wisdom and easily bagged by the charmer.
3It is, by the way, considered extremely unlucky to give or receive instruction in this serpent rāga, and when a music master desires to be rid of an undesirable pupil he says nothing impolite, but declines to teach him in any other tonality.
5Pan's pipes were the rural instruments of Arcadia, and survive among shepherds in many countries. Mrs. Brown possesses a variety from British Guiana, showing fourteen reeds of varying lengths set in a hollow piece of wood and bound with rushes.
7The Fiji Islands furnish a slender reed, ornamented with charred lines and figures, bearing the engaging title of "nose flute." Among the African instruments are various flutes and flageolets. One, such as still beguiles the solitude of the Berber shepherd, is pierced with five equidistant finger holes, exactly like a bone specimen found in a French bone cave.
9The Temple shell—a conch shell—exactly such as our Puritan forefathers used to call the farm hands to 12 o'clock dinner, turns out to possess a deep religious significance. It is found in every temple in India, is sounded during religious ceremonies, in processions, and before shrines of Hindu deities. It is called the S'thankhn. In Southern India it is employed by a class of temple servers called Dassari. No tune can be played on it, but the tone is capable of much modulation by the lips, and is not devoid of a certain charm. In China the conch-shell trumpet is used by soldiers and watchmen. In Japan it has uses both secular and religious. It is usually carried in a bag or net of small cords.
11Among the other historic wind instruments in the collection is said to be a shophar, which I could not find. There are two pipes remarkable from a mechanical point of view. One is a whistle played by inhalation. The other is the Chinese cheng, or mouth organ, common to all Mongolian peoples. It consists of seventeen pipes (each containing a free reed) set in a common air chamber. A mouthpiece connected with this chamber conducts the air through all the pipes simultaneously. The player closes with his finger a little hole below the reed in the pipe which he wishes to sound. The jump from this primitive organ to the modern keyed instrument is very great, and is hardly bridged by the beautiful little portable organ which enriches the antiquarian part of this excellent collection.
13The cheng was originally a combination of bamboo and gourd—two materials of instrument manufacture which the Chinese recognize as possessing distinct musical properties. Gourds play an important part in the evolution of our modern instruments. In the East they still furnish the bodies of mandolins, guitars and fiddles. Their most elegant application is in the vina, of which more hereafter.
15The bamboo canes possess a peculiarly musical resonance. Their knots and fibres practically invented more than one instrument without human assistance. Madagascar even furnishes a bamboo violin, of which the strings are fibres of the same strip of cane of which the body is made, carefully separated from each other and raised on little bridges wedged between them and the cane body of which they are a part.
17Oriental pentatonic scales, like their Scotch relatives, have peculiar melodic properties. The pentatonic dulcimers, in which the collection is rich, cannot escape melody. There is a stand of resonant bamboo canes in the collection, the exquisite liquid and mellow gurgle of which cannot be imagined, no occidental instrument of percussion resembles it. It consists of strings of canes, three canes of aliquot lengths on a string, which when struck against each other give rise to a series of harmonious combinations as delicious as they are unique.
19In the manufacture of metal instruments of percussion Oriental nations offer a perfection apparently inimitable. Turkish cymbals, Chinese and Japanese bronze gongs and bells possess a depth of tone and freedom of resonance unknown and inexplicable among Western nations, and, like every other development of music, the highest perfection is found in the hands of the priesthood in religious services.
21Aside from noisy instruments used in the public service, the home life of Eastern nations has developed several varieties of stringed harps and zithers as original as they are perfect. In India the vina and its opponent, the sitar, reign supreme. They are both elaborated from a fingerboard, furnished above with movable bridges and below with gourd resonators. The vina has a soft and mellow tone, whereas the sitar is rather brilliant. Among this tribe is a variety which possesses a gourd body, like a mandolin, at the bottom, and a gourd resonator at the top of the long fingerboard. Europe is indebted to India for more than one of her musical treasures. There sympathetic strings were first discovered and practically applied. There the bow was invented. The beautiful workmanship and charming shape of the Indian instruments in the collection evidence the civilization of the people who perfected them.
23The solo instrument of Japan is a sort of immense zither, called a koto. It is played with plectra, and is susceptible of very delicate tuning, in the act of playing, as is our violin. It possesses a large number of strings passing over movable bridges, and is capable of a perfect chromatic sequence. In construction the koto is related to the psalter of the Middle Ages. The Burmese national instrument, on the contrary (played only by young men), is a harp with a large wooden body like a boat. It is specially interesting to note that it is tuned by tightening a series of cords with tassels attached to the strings. This explains
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