Historical Development of Indian Music: A Critical Study c8.8

c8.8

Well has it been said by Alfred Einstein that the first beginnings of music lie even deeper in historical obscurity than those of speech. Yet we shall have to gather knowledge of the origin and evolution of music for our historical study and culture. The musical medium is the music proper, as executed in the form of physical sounds, which have their physiological and psychical correlates. Sound forms the base of musical manifestation, or it will be correct to say that material sound forms the physic or corporeal body and impulse or emotion, the *psyche* or soul of music. So when inarticulate speech is developed into the use of certain sounds as symbols for impulse or emotion, we have the beginning of speech, as distinguished from tonal manifestation or music. It may be said to be an intellectual development in the field of articulate speech, leaving music for the expression of emotion or emotive feeling of man. In fact, the will to create music is an intellectual message or inspiration to man and when he creates music, his feelings are moulded in pure tone-experience, and the musical material and form take the shape of a stimulus for feeling of the beauty of tone or music in itself, aside from formal art or meaning. A similar process also originated in the minds of the primitive men, at the beginning of the manifestation of music on earth.