The Music of Hindostan c5.43

c5.43

It is all very sad; but there can be only one remedy—to accept the conditions and to make music first in spite of them, and afterwards on the strength of them. Music which is not built upon the immediate instincts and needs of the people is no music at all; they must make the formal details of their music just as they make their language—by actually singing and speaking. It is as far from the truth to say that 'modes' and 'times' must remain in their primitive condition as to say that poetry of the twentieth century must be in Chaucer's English, or a Bengali love-song in Vedic Sanskrit.