The Music of Hindostan c11.115

c11.115

The claim is occasionally made that this music has harmony, or a ‘sort of’ harmony, in it. Such feeling for harmony as is involved in the construction of a scale at all, especially of such an elaborate and balanced scale, or in the appreciation of the greater sonority of C G C over the simple C in the drone, it has. But of harmony, in the sense either (1) of the sequent intervals in melody being chosen for their consonance, or (2) of two notes being sounded simultaneously for the sake of the consonance, there is none; there is less even than among the North American Indians whose music,¹ as far as at present investigated, is at a very early stage. And it seems impossible that there should be any. Hindu music, though it has enormously refined the detail, has not advanced beyond the principles of Greek music. This may not seem an inducement to deny them harmony to those who still think that the Greeks had harmony. But at least this is true that harmony in the sense of the Organum and of Dufay did not become possible till the Greek modes had long lost any feeling of the *mesē* (*aṃśa*) and of the functions (*dunameis*) of the other notes.² And the first thing that harmony would do, if now applied even tentatively to Indian music, as some advocate, would be to get rid of that feeling and those functions, and with them of the grace-notes and all that makes *Rāg* worth having. As the *Rāg* now is, its notes are like the pieces on the chess-board; harmony, by investing them all equally with powers of its own, would make them like the pawns. Hence the serious menace to Indian music of the harmonium, which has penetrated already to the remotest parts of India.³ It dominates the theatre, and desolates the hearth; and before long it will, if it does not already, desecrate the temple. Besides its deadening effect on a living art, it falsifies it by being out of tune with itself. This is a grave defect, though its gravity can be exaggerated; it could also be lessened by a revised tuning. A worse fault is that it is a borrowed instrument, constructed originally to minister to the less noble kind of music of other lands. It has taken a century to invent and perfect the pianoforte; if she must have the fatal facility of a keyed instrument, India could well spare a century or two for inventing something that should do justice to her music.