Historical Development of Indian Music: A Critical Study c8.9

c8.9

Music can reveal many things of the human world, which words or speech cannot. So the primitive people did everything through words and speech, but when they sang the songs, they did it through tones and tunes, forming the narratives or stories of their daily lives. They observed the rhythm by the clanking of stones, the pounding of wood or by the dashing of stone spearheads against wooden shields. Possibly getting the idea from the hide-covered shield, they stretched skins across the two open ends of the hollow trunks of tree or covered the open mouth of the earthen ditches and thus invented the musical instruments like drum, which accompanied their songs and dances. To keep time and to create stirring emotion, they clapped their hands, nodded their heads and moved the limbs of their bodies, and from them they gradually gathered the sense of measure of time, which, in turn, gave rise to the idea of rhythm. The primitive nations did not know at first the ratios and distant measures of the tones, but yet they used to add the notes to the words or speech, making them suitable for music. They knew the proper modes of utterances or the process of intonation. Just as a word was sometimes a sentence to the primitive men, so was a tone in songs something of a melody. Gradually they observed the forms and beauty of cadences of rise and fall in words and tones, and from the succession of words and tones, they discovered the laws and forms of melody, though in a crude form. The growth of melody was one of the main reasons why music was so significant in the life of primitive people. Prof. Marius Schneider says that primitive melody did not grow out of harmony, harmony was rather the product of melodic variants. Singing and dancing were closely related among the primitive people and they used to generate something which was more than the original movements themselves. All the rites relating to birth, circumcision, marriage, hunting, war, weather, medicine, and death were permeated with musical elements. Among the funeral songs, the women's laments and the songs which men sang in praise of the dead deserved special mention. In primitive cultures it was very difficult to distinguish musically the various kinds of songs since there was still so little differentiation of form. Often the type of voice used determined the character of a melody. Funeral songs and erotic songs were often sung in a nasal voice; love-songs were accompanied by a significant play of the lips. In more highly developed cultures, formal differentiation was usually determined by the various layers of tradition and that tradition was evident in every society of every nation, whether primitive or advanced. An archaic style survived in animal-songs and hunting-songs, and also in children's songs, funeral songs, epic songs, and in medicine and weather charms. Lamentations had a style of their own. In songs of praise of gods or supermen, the melodic line and volume tended either to rise emphatically or to start very high. Schneider says that the relation between the musical style and the content of the primitive song i.e. the words lies not in the external occasion like rain, war, etc. but in the prevailing psychological tension. As for example, if the witch doctor implores the spirit of disease to release his patient, the song will be friendly;