The Music of Hindostan c5.6

c5.6

On the other hand, the most obvious thing about melody, a succession of single notes, is that the tune ‘lies’ high or low, that it has, as we say, a high tessitura or the reverse. This implies a level on which as a whole the song rests, and in comparison with which its salient passages are high or low. ‘Laws’ of melody spring into existence as the distance between these two levels, and the manner of passing from one to the other, come to be established and, later, stereotyped—as, for instance, in the ‘Final’ and ‘Reciting’ notes of Ecclesiastical music. In the process the intervening notes, and others beyond these two salient points, acquire varying ‘importance’ subsidiary to that of the two principal notes; and the whole of unharmonized song is laid out with reference to this variety of importance.