The Music of Hindostan c9.13

c9.13

No melodies have been noted in India until quite modern times, so that we have no direct means of determining what those songs were of which the scales were later tabulations. But we may perhaps take remoteness of local origin to be an efficient substitute for antiquity of record; and these seven ‘conclusions’ may therefore not be without value as a guide to the constitution of the early forms of scale. At any rate no reading of the theory would be satisfactory if it did serious violence to the practice.