The Music of Hindostan c11.53

c11.53

The aesthetic effect of the amśa is important. Whatever may have been its origin—and there is every probability that it was the tonic in the same sense as the Greek mesē—its present function is to define the tessitura. With harmonized melody we are not accustomed to think much about this—until perhaps we have to consider what sort of song we shall be able to sing when we are tired.³ But in unharmonized music very much, more than anything else, depends on the general level in which the song lies. A song with a high tessitura has quite a different character from a song with a low one. It was in this very point that in Greece the ‘plaintive’ modes (e.g. the Mixolydic) were distinguished from the ‘soft and convivial’ (e.g. the Lydic), according to Dr. Macran (Harmonics of Aristoxenus, 1902, pp. 39–81). An example of the plaintive kind of Greek song with a high tessitura (and the Mixolydic fifth) may be seen in Pachtikos (Aismata Hellēnica, Athens, 1905, No. 133), a funeral dirge circling about B, B♭, and A, and descending to a tonic E. There is no doubt also of the low position of the amśa in the convivial Kaliāns (Nos. 50–59), or of its high position in the serious Bhairavī (32) and Bhairav (37). Similarly, the theme of Mozart’s Clavier Sonata in A major owes perhaps some of its alertness to its high, and that of the Choral Symphony something of its restraint to its middle tessitura; but we can hardly be said to have erected this into a principle of our art.