The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan c3.6

c3.6

The greater freedom in musical intervals melodic systems allow must be reckoned as compensating in some measure for the want of those harmonic combinations of which our European music has such inexhaustible wealth. What we lose in the possession of this rich estate is that we are effectually barred from the use and enjoyment of a more pliant melody, free from the fetters imposed by consonant chords, a melody which has a great privilege in easily touching the emotions. Recent scale theories, claiming to have their foundation in natural laws, are insufficient to account for the material which allows the pliability of Eastern melody. But they are insufficient even to account for our common diatonic scale, the structure of which rests upon three harmonic triads, and with chromatic and enharmonic systems are utterly irreconcilable. Under Captain Day’s guidance we find that in India an ancient quarter-tone system has become in modern times a half-tone one—substantially our equal temperament, but permitting an expressive or ornamental use of smaller intervals than the half-tone, according to the player’s feeling or fancy. Whether this ideally half-tone system is due to a natural transformation tending to simplicity—as we find the rich Sanskrit reduced in modern vernacular dialects—or to an adaptation more suitable for practical use than a fine-spun theory of ancient music teachers, must, like nearly all the questions that have here been propounded, remain open or be regarded as beyond the possibility of answer.