Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.69

c14.69

There is some interesting evidence for Aryan music. Cymbals were used to accompany dancing, and in addition to this and the drum there were reed flutes or pipes, a stringed instrument of the lute class, and a harp or lyre, which is mentioned as having seven tones or notes. This last piece of information is important for our knowledge of ancient music. Galpin has shown that instruments possessing fixed scales, such as harps, lyres, and flutes, are known from Western Asia from very early times (a bow-shaped harp was used in Jemdet Nasr times, and other more elaborate types were, as is well known, found in the Early Dynastic Royal Tombs at Ur). There is good evidence that these instruments were constructed according to the heptatonic scale (seven notes, with the eighth completing the octave, as with all European instrumental music of the present day). This heptatonic scale is the basis of modern Hindu music, where it exists (as in other regions of the world) side by side with another, more primitive, scale, that of five notes, or the pentatonic, based on quintal harmony and primitive vocal traditions. It is our normal musical scale with the third and seventh, the semitone intervals, missing. Curwen has recently taken this question of the two musical scales a stage further and related it to our archaeological knowledge, and he makes it clear that the spread of the heptatonic scale is intimately associated with instrumental music originating in the ancient urban civilizations of Western Asia, but dispersed beyond its original home by Indo-European peoples in the second millennium B.C. and later. He traces an early dispersal to India and even to China, and a later diffusion westwards with the Celtic peoples, with Britain as perhaps its last place of arrival in the middle of the first millennium B.C., so that the Hebridean folk-songs still retain the ancient, pre-Indo-European mode of the pentatonic scale today. (Incidentally the pentatonic idiom, derived from West Africa, plays its part in modern jazz music.)