The Music of Hindostan c17.10

c17.10

The homogeneity of a melody is based differently with them and with us. The musical sentence is in both cases made up of salient and abeyant notes, just as the verbal sentence is made up of nouns and verbs in prominence, and the other parts of speech in subordination. But with them the salient notes are fixed by long association; with us they are made such by the momentary impulse of the harmony or counterpoint. The distinction is not unlike that between verse and prose as the chosen vehicle of a people’s literature; poetry fills a form which is brought to it, and the words assert their value by fighting against it, though they yield to it; prose creates its own form in the process of uttering itself, and this form emerges from the conflict and balance of phrases rather than of words. In the same sort of way individual notes have in modal music their value as filling out with detail a form already supplied, while for harmonized music points of structure, such as melodic figures, have value as creating and articulating form as the music proceeds. In the first it is the note, in the second the cluster of notes that is to be true to ‘mode’.