Books › The music and musical instruments of Japan, 1909 › scan 223
Scan 223
The music and musical instruments of Japan, 1909
6 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. Printed page 183. See the scan on archive.org.
111 [Page 47].—That public examinations for degrees in music and diplomas are held under authorisation is proof of the great importance in which the art is regarded in Japan. The very long study it requires, and the slow progress made in it, are evidences of the abundant leisure which everyone seems to enjoy in that country. It seems that everything must be done thoroughly, and each step completely mastered, before a fresh advance is taken—a very different state of things from that which exists here, where bogus institutions, intent on fee-gathering, are too ready to issue degrees and diplomas for payment, combined with very little knowledge or proficiency.
312 [Page 63].—The history of the scale, or series of sounds, employed by the Japanese in their music, is so obscure, that an attempt to unravel its origin and trace its development would probably result in adding little to our knowledge. The scale was no doubt derived from Chinese sources, and its chief interest for us lies in its present capacity of expression. So far as we are able to determine by hearing their music and examining the tunings of their instruments, and apart from the scientific testing of the individual sounds by means of a syren or a graduated monochord, the notes employed by the Japanese do not materially differ from the sounds we use. They may not be mathematically the same as our tempered system, so far as the exact number of their individual vibrations is concerned, but they are practically identical with our diatonic and chromatic scales. In all probability the Japanese have had no mathematicians able to determine the vibration-number of the notes and their ratios to one another, nor do they seem acquainted with the acoustic laws of harmonies on which the Western system of chord-construction is founded, yet their musicians have arrived at much the same result as obtains with us. The question is one of much interest, because among the near neighbours of the Chinese are the Hindoos, and in the not far south the Maories. Carl Engel and Captain C. H. Day have pointed out that these nations employ a scale containing many more sounds in the octaves than those used by us; while the Javanese, according to Mr. W. Ellis, divide their octave into five exactly equal parts. Yet the Japanese system is allied to the Western method, and the Eastern systems of their nearer neighbours are ignored.
5In one respect the Japanese follow the Eastern plan of slurring up or down to a note instead of taking it firmly; this occurs chiefly in their vocal music, but it has caused musical visitors to declare that they sing out of tune, and use minuter intervals than ours. This declaration is founded on as erroneous an assumption as it would be to declare that our string-instrument players did the same when they slurred up to a note, or to censure a vocalist for singing out of tune when passing insensibly from the leading note to the tonic at the close of a song. We must admit that the Japanese know of and use all our intervals, but the haphazard sort of way they select the notes to tune their strings to, and the fact that the systematised scale we accept as a logical ladder of sounds is not recognised by them, and that in much of their music some notes find no place, have caused investigators to come to the conclusion that the Japanese scale is an imperfect one. This is as much an error as it would be to assume that a piece of modern music, deliberately written without employing the fourth or seventh of the scale, did not belong to our diatonic method. We cannot judge of what intervals a scale is composed merely by the tuning of certain strings, neither can we say that as system is truncated because we find tunes in which some notes are omitted. The
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