THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC. u 



perfectly displayed in musical utterance, is imperfectly displayed 

 in emotional speech. Just as under emotion we see swayings of 

 the body and wringings of the hands, so do we see contractions 

 of the vocal organs which are now stronger and now weaker. 

 Surely it is manifest that the utterances of passion, far from being 

 monotonous, are characterized by rapidly-recurring ascents and 

 descents of tone and by rapidly-recurring emphases : there is 

 rhythm, though it is an irregular rhythm. 



"Want of knowledge of the principles of evolution has, in an- 

 other place, led Mr. Gurney to represent as an objection what is 

 in reality a verification. He says : 



" Music is distinguished from emotional speech in that it proceeds not only by- 

 fixed degrees in time, bat by fixed degrees in the scale. This is a constant quality 

 through all the immense quantity of embryo and developed scale-systems that 

 have been used : whereas the transitions of pitch which mark emotional affec- 

 tions of voice are, as Helmholtz has pointed out, of a gliding character" (p. 113). 



Had Mr. Gurney known that evolution in all cases is from the 

 indefinite to the definite, he would have seen that as a matter of 

 course the gradations of emotional speech must be indefinite in 

 comparison with the gradations of developed music. Progress 

 from the one to the other is in part constituted by increasing defi- 

 niteness in the time-intervals and increasing definiteness in the 

 tone-intervals. Were it otherwise, the hypothesis I have set forth 

 would lack one of its evidences. To his allegation that not only 

 the " developed scale-systems " but also the " embryo " scale-sys- 

 tems are definite, it may obviously be replied that the mere exist- 

 ence of any scale-system capable of being written down, implies 

 that the earlier stage of the progress has already been passed 

 through. To have risen to a scale-system is to have become defi- 

 nite ; and until a scale-system has been reached vocal phrases can 

 not have been recorded. Moreover had Mr. Gurney remembered 

 that there are many people with musical perceptions so imper- 

 fect that when making their merely recognizable, and sometimes 

 hardly recognizable, attempts to whistle or hum melodies, they 

 show how vague are their appreciations of musical intervals, he 

 would have seen reason for doubting his assumption that definite 

 scales were reached all at once. The fact that in what we call 

 bad ears there are all degrees of imperfection, joined with the 

 fact that where the imperfection is not great practice may remedy 

 it, suffice of themselves to show that definite perceptions of musi- 

 cal intervals were reached by degrees. 



Some of Mr. Gurney's objections are strangely insubstantial. 

 Here is an example : 



"The fact is that song, which moreover in our time is but a limited branch of 

 music, is perpetually making conscious efforts ; for instance, the most peaceful 

 melody may be a considerable strain to a soprano voice, if sung in a very high 



