The Music of Hindostan c17.173

c17.173

Are there not singers amongst us who have felt a desire to break loose, if it were possible, from the trammels of our tonality—from its ‘closes’ and ‘half closes’, its ‘conceded modulations’, its ‘unity of design’, its rhythmical rigidities and its fussy logic—and to let the melody bear them along on light wings of fancy; to find, in fact, a music which is free like that of the woods in spring-time, where, without rule, the uncouthest tones like the crudest colours all harmonize, where, unguided and unthwarted, sound and silence answer one another, where the inchoate and incomplete are made good by the motherly bounties of Nature, and ‘unbroken perfection is over all’? Something of this is in the careless profusion and the unstudied rapture of Indian song: