The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan c5.20

c5.20

Most of the vernacular works upon music have been written by Pandits, who have endeavoured to adapt the principles contained in the ancient works to their own ideas. Many of these books consist but of a string of quotations—often contradictory—taken at random from Sanskrit works of all dates, and interlarded with comments rather worse than useless, unless it be to mystify the reader. The writers of such books rarely know anything of the modern practice of music. They still try to fetter it by hard and fast rules learnt from books. Rules of the sort, of course, were made at a time when music as an art was comparatively in its infancy, but were never intended to apply to modern Indian music. It would be just as absurd to suppose that treatises on the music of the eighth and ninth centuries, where progressions by chords of (8/5/1) were not only allowed but admired,⁶ would apply to the elaborate harmony of to-day.