The Music of Hindostan c16.s1.193

c16.s1.193

A European has great difficulty in giving himself account of these queer modes, because of the enormous difference between having the tonality condensed into a few contrasted chords and having it spread over a melody in successive notes which are epitomized as a scale. There is, however, a step between chord and scale in the arpeggio, as we may observe when immature pianoforte players sound the left hand before the right. It is useful sometimes to consider chords as scales, and scales as chords. Our harmony has gone through three chief moments in its history: the diminished seventh, the augmented triad, and now the whole tone scale, or chord,¹ have successively been regarded as the limit of permissible dissonance. Their double nature, scale and chord, becomes clear if we write them out as arpeggios: