The Music of Hindostan c13.s2.103

c13.s2.103

If the explanation of the longer groups as typical examples of recitation was correct, the time-values of the several notes may well have been somewhat indefinite; we do not feel in the example from Milton that the musical notes present our style of reading more than approximately, nor that we should invariably read it so. In reciting a whole sentence the structure of one word reacts imperceptibly on the pronunciation of the next and interferes with the time-value. But these short groups cannot be sentences; they can at most be single words, and there is every probability that they represent exact time-values. And in passing from those to these we may be passing from the Cola, Commata, Membra, Incisiones, Distinctiones, &c., of the tenth century in Europe to the Modi, Proprietates, Perfectiones, and so forth of the fourteenth—from music which regulated its time-values by the words, to music which evolved its own values.