The Music of Hindostan c13.s1: I. Language

The Music of Hindostan c13.s1

Language: English

I. Language

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Those who spoke and speak Sanskrit have shown the delicate appreciation they had of minute phonetic changes. They have introduced modifications of the word to suit every emergency of context, and have recorded these with a precision to which Europe is a stranger. We may acquaint ourselves theoretically with the characteristics of the language, but it requires an effort to feel their effect and therefore to realize the force of the music which suits it. What we find difficult is to make a syllable long without putting a stress on it, or to put a stress at will on any short syllable; we do not easily imagine the effect of a language which is quantitative and not (or only slightly) accentual. In setting such a word as *Ălăkălăllă*, an Englishman would certainly put the fourth syllable on the musical accent, because he would think at once of *Abracadábra*, confusing duration with stress. It has been set in an Indian song:

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Tāl Rūpak.

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Ex. 308. A-la-ka-lā-lla lā-da-

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and could no doubt have been set in other ways provided the fourth syllable were *longer* than the others; and we notice that it does not disturb the singer that the first syllable, which is short, comes on the accent, while the two long syllables (*lā*) come one of them off and the other on the accent; but both are kept long, and all the short syllables are kept short in the music. It is moreover set not in 6/8, as the sound of the word would have suggested to us that it should be, but in 3/4, which further throws a slight emphasis on the syllable *ka-*, because, as we shall see, the beat comes there. Not that a long syllable invariably has a long note, especially if two or three of them come together; but it does as a rule.

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In our poetry we do not know long and short, only stressed and unstressed syllables. When Keats writes:

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Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred;

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there is hardly a syllable that we can call longer than the others, unless perhaps ‘ground’. But there are several places where we pause between the words, making up a kind of imaginary musical time. We lengthen out the last syllable of ‘sodden’ because of the next word. If that word had been ‘earth’, ‘sodden’ would have gone quicker. As it is, a little more emphasis is laid on ‘sódden ground’ than would be the case in ‘sodden earth’; and the same thing happens with ‘nerveless, listless’, where the difficulty of pronouncing one word after the other makes us pause a little at the termination and so throw a slightly greater emphasis on the root of the word.

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All this is unlike Sanskrit. If we could imagine these syllables to occur in their poetry they would all be long by position—sōddēn grōūnd. ‘Nerveless, listless, dead’ would be altered to ‘nerveleh, listleh, dead’, the whole idea of the line being to run smoothly on as if it were one word, and not to aim at what we prize, the variety imported into it by the irregular stresses. Consequently rests are seldom written (except in order to break up the metre intentionally in a dramatic way) in any of their songs, at any rate not, as we should, on account of the words: