The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan c3.5

c3.5

The object of this introduction will be gained if we, for a little while, allow ourselves to forget the glory and splendour of our modern harmony, in favour of those melodic systems which once satisfied the great nations of classical antiquity, and still content those hoary civilisations of the East which preserve so much that is really ancient in their present daily life. Captain Day shows us interesting resemblances between the leading modes of old Greece and Asia Minor and certain favourite modes of the Hindus. There is no sure evidence of an intimate musical connection between those countries and India, a few scattered references in classical writers excepted; but the relationship of sister Aryan languages may have been paralleled by a relationship of musical types sufficient to justify a theory of descent instead of one of imitation.