CHAPTER III

FOLK-MUSIC

THE basis of all music and the very first steps in the long story of musical development are to be found in the musical utterances of the most undeveloped and unconscious types of humanity; such as unadulterated savages and inhabitants of lonely isolated districts well removed from any of the influences of education and culture. Such savages are in the same position in relation to music as the remote ancestors of the race before the story of the artistic development of music began; and through study of the ways in which they contrive their primitive fragments of tune and rhythm, and of the principles upon which they string these together, the first steps of musical development may be traced. True folkmusic begins a step higher, when these fragments of tune, as nuclei, are strung together upon any principles which give an appearance of orderliness and completeness; but the power to organise materials in such a manner does not come to human creatures till a long way above the savage stage. In such things a savage lacks the power to think consecutively, or to hold the relations of different factors in his mind at once. His phrases are necessarily very short, and the order in which they are given is unsystematic. It would be quite a feat for the aboriginal brain to keep enough factors under control at once to get even two phrases to balance in an orderly manner. The standard of completeness in design depends upon the standard of intelligence of the makers of the product; and it cannot therefore be expected to be definite or systematic when it represents the intellectual standard of savages. Nevertheless the crudest efforts of savages throw light upon the true nature of musical design, and upon the

manner in which human beings endeavoured to grapple with it. The very futility of the arrangement of the musical figures in the tunes of savages is most instructive, and the gradual development of power to arrange them in an intelligible order is clearly seen to proceed parallel to the general development of capacities of all kinds in the human race.

At the very bottom of the process of development are those savage howls which have hardly any distinct notes in them at all. Many travellers record such things, and try to represent them in the European musical stave. For instance, the natives of Australia are described by a French traveller as beginning a howl on a high note and descending a full octave in semitones; and the Caribs are described by an English traveller as doing the same thing. Every one who knows

Carib.

sf

anything about music is aware that the stave notation cannot in this case represent the reality, as a downward scale of

correct semitones is beyond the powers of any but very highly

trained singers even in advanced stages of musical development. Another traveller quotes some Polynesian cannibals as gloating over their living victims, shortly to be devoured, and singing gruesomely suggestive passages of rising quarter tones. In all such cases the process must have been a gliding of the voice up or down, without notes that were strictly defined either in relation to one another or to any general principle. This process of gliding is familiar in every stage of art, even the most advanced, and always implies direct

*

Compare the following Hungarian tune for the same type of expression made into music :

human expression in the action, for it is obviously out of the range of any scale. But in advanced stages of art it is a mere accessory which the performers use for expressive purposes at their own discretion, and it is not often indicated in the actual writing of the musical material of compositions. With the savage it is pure human expression no further advanced than the verge of formulation into musical terms.

The first step beyond this is the achievement of a single musical figure which is reiterated over and over again. Of this form the aborigines of Australia are recorded to afford the following example:

This simple figure they are said to have gone on singing over and over again for hours. It seems to represent a melancholy gliding of the voice downwards--the first artistic articulation of the typical whine above described—and as far as it represents any scale, it indicates the use of the downward fourth as the essential characteristic interval, with a downward-tending leading note (see page 23). A similar example of the reiteration of a single figure is quoted by a traveller from Tongataboo, which is also described as being repeated endlessly over and over again :

et cet.

savages

It is extremely difficult to make sure what intervals intend to utter, as they are very uncertain about hitting anything like exact notes* till they have advanced enough to have instruments with regular relations of notes more or less indicated upon them. But if the latter illustration can be trusted, it represents the nucleus of the pentatonic system

* See note at the end of the volume.

(page 21), with a sort of ornamental glide round one of the essential notes.

Reiteration similar to that shown in the above examples is also described by Mr. A. H. Savage Landor in his account of his travels among the "hairy Ainu," the peculiar and isolated race that now inhabit the Kurile Islands, north of Japan. He says, “The same phrase recurs again and again in their songs." And again, "Ainu music . is monotonous and continually repeats itself."

From a very different and distant group of natives, the Macusi Indians of Guiana in South America, comes a formula of repetition which is one step further advanced, as there is a contrast of two melodic formulas, A and B.

The design is obviously unsymmetrical, and the real impulse of the singers seems to have been to derive pleasure from the mere sense of contrast between the two little musical figures, and, like children, to reiterate the first phrase till they were tired of it, and then to sing the second a little for a change, and then to go back to A for a little, and then sometimes to reiterate B till they were tired of that, and then to go back to A again, and so on. They are said to have gone on doing this for hours.

As we rise in the human scale the phrases get longer and more varied; and the relation of phrase to phrase becomes more intelligible, and the order in which they occur becomes more symmetrical. The relative lack of mental power shows itself in weakness and indefiniteness of design. A sort of music will go on for a long time, but be totally devoid of systematic coherence; indeed, resembling nothing so much as

attempts at stories made by excitable children or people of weak intellect, who forget their point before they are halfway through, and string incidents together which have in reality nothing to do with one another.* There is a most remarkable example of this kind of helplessness in a long Trouvère song in an English manuscript of the thirteenth century. It tells the story of Samson, and begins by reiterating a very genial little fragment of tune,

which rambles on pleasantly for some time, and then—as if there had been enough of it-is replaced by another phrase of similar type, which in turn gives place to another, without any attempt at system or balance or co-ordination of the musical material. It is as if the singer went on with a little phrase till he was tired of it, and then tried another till he was tired of that, and so on as long as the words required.

A type of this sort, with a little more sense of system, is quoted from Mozambique :—

I

It must be confessed that this must either have been improved

* See note at the end of the volume.