The Music of Hindostan c5.35

c5.35

All this brings the listener into closer touch with the poignancy of human suffering than the supremest moments of Western music ever do. . . . The melodies do not, however, speak to us of sorrows so remote or so unintelligible as those of a Mongol or a Chinaman. If not at home in them, we seem at least to understand them. They depict the pain of a highly wrought nature which, though it has travelled down the centuries by another path, is yet not radically different from our own. And the gipsies, though through the medium of a less civilized music, have made us to some extent familiar with these forlorn and feverish accents.