THE MUSIC OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES AND THE BEGIN- 

 NINGS OF EUROPEAN MUSIC 



By Willy Pastor. 



More than once liave we heard in this hall, by means of the phono- 

 graph, an echo of the sounds which to primitive peoples are the 

 height of all musical beauty. To us it seems a strange music. The 

 repetition of certam very short motifs, noisily executed and profusely 

 and weirdly accented by cries, clapping of hands, the dronmg, or 

 striking of percussion instruments — all that gives expression to 

 moods as foreign to us as though it came out of another world. Even 

 educated musicians are perplexed by such acoustic phenomena. 

 They can hardly perceive the difference between quite distmct 

 motifs. At the outset, however, we can hardly distinguish between 

 one negro and another, and it is a question of persistence if we are 

 to understand in all their diversity the religious songs, dances, and 

 folk-songs of the lower and lowest peoples. Of course a real under- 

 standmg of sensation will never be possible. Two different worlds 

 are reflected m the music of primitive peoples and m our own, and 

 each must have had its own peculiar character for more than 3,000 

 j'^ears. Let us try, in order to form an antithesis, to translate from 

 sound mto sight. For such an ex])eriment, the differentiation sug- 

 gested by Hornbostcl is very important. He ])roposed to separate 

 music into horizontal and vertical music. Horizontal music is the 

 monotony of those exotic motifs compared to which the most insig- 

 nificant of our intervals can signify so much. A single one of our 

 chords is like a precipice when we think of the monotonous music of 

 primitive peoples. If we compare the })rnneval Pan's pipes and their 

 thin tone with the great richness and plastic power of our organ, 

 we shall then have k classic examjilc of tlic difference between hori- 

 zontal and vertical, or, if you prefer, between the music of two and 

 three dimensions. The horizontal or two-dimension music has become 

 so foreign to us that we must try to bring it back to our hearing agam. 

 In this we shall succeed quickest if we concentrate our minds on the 

 manner of playing and the sound character of a group of mstruments 



1 Translated by permission from the Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, Berlin, vol. 42, 1910, pp. 654-675. 



679 



