The Evolution of the Art of Music (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FOLK-MVSIC The basis of all music and the very first steps in the long story of musical development are to be found in the musical utterances of the most undeveloped and unconscious types of humanity; such as unadulterated savages and inhabitants of lonely isolated districts well removed from any of the influences of education and culture. Such savages are in the same position in relation to music as the remote ancestors of the race before the story of the artistic development of music began; and through study of the ways in which they contrive their primitive fragments of tune and rhythm, and of the principles upon which they string these together, the first steps of musical development may be traced. True folk- music begins a step higher, when these fragments of tune, as ' nuclei, are strung together upon any principles which give an appearance of orderliness and completeness; but the power to organise materials in such a manner does not come to human creatures till a long way above the savage stage. In such things a savage lacks the power to think consecutively, or to bold the relations of different factors in his mind at once. (His phrases are necessarily very short, and the order in which they are given is unsystematicj It would be quite a feat for the aboriginal brain to keep enough factors under control at once to get even two phrases to balance in an orderly manner. The standard of completeness in design depends upon the standard of intelligence of the makers of the product; and it cannot therefore be expected to be definite or systematic when it represents the intellectual standard of savages. Nevertheless the crudest efforts of savages throw light upon the true nature of musical design, and upon themanner in which human beings endeavoured to grapple wit...