The Music of Hindostan c18.10

c18.10

It would be a rash thing to say that the European method of harmony is the only possible one. All that can be said is that it is perfectly logical. This breaking up of the drone is, at bottom, the moment when the desire arises to contrast not one note with another, but one whole passage of the song with another passage, and that is the way in which music has always advanced. We saw something that looked very like this in Exs. 93 and 99. All that really happens in the second of these examples is that the mother and son sing the same tune at different pitches. But it reminds us of a stage in our own art when, as in the times before Tye and Tallis, in whose music there are still traces of it, the soprano and tenor parts had a flat less in the signature than the other two parts.