The Music of Hindostan c17.11

c17.11

Still, phrases after all are made of notes; and just as the notes of Hindu melodies must be ‘in’ an assigned mode (of tune or time), so must the notes of ours, if they are to be strong, have a firm diatonic and rhythmic basis. Chromatic notes easily become sentimental—become ‘weak forms of strong things’—when they are unduly dwelt upon and distract attention from the big words of the sentence (as in the march of the Persian soldiers in the *Fall of Babylon*), not when they are there only to make intelligible the big words which without them would be too startling (as in ‘O du mein holder Abendstern’).¹ Diatonic is, of course, an expansive word. The diatonic scale is not the same to one generation as to the next, any more than modes are stereotyped for every time and place. But inside the accepted diatonic the notes must move as a compact whole, or the melody become heterogeneous.