COXTRIBUTIOXS TO THE HISTORY OF MUSICAL SCALES. 



Bj Charles Kasson Wead, 

 Examiner, United States Patent Office. 



I. INTRODUCTION. 



In the development of inu.sical scales four stages may be recognized: 



1. The stag-e of primiti\'e music, where there is no more indication 

 of a scale than in the sounds of birds, animals, or of nature. Students 

 of the origin of music may give free rein to their fancy in this period, 

 and the uncertain musical utterances of living primitive peoples may 

 be construed in accordance with almost any prepossession of the hearer. 



2. The stage of instruments mechanically capable of furnishing a 

 scale. This stage has l)een almost entirely overlooked by students and 

 is the special subject of the following paper. 



3. The stage of theoretical melodic scales — Greek, Arab, Chinese, 

 Hindu. Mediieval, etc. All the original treatises concerning these 

 scales imply that a stage of development has been reached far in 

 advance of the second. Thousands of pages have been written on this 

 stage, largely polemical and lacking in insight, for the subject has been 

 a dark one: but Ellis and Hipkins's work of 1885 has thrown a flood 

 of light on it. 



4. The stage of the modern harmonic scale and its desceudent, the 

 equally tempered scale, which are alike dependent both on a theory 

 and on the possibilit}" of embodying it in instruments. The relation 

 of this scale to the present study will be noticed later. 



These four stages, of course, overlap even in the same locality': they 

 correspond in a rough waj' to the recognized four culture stages, 

 namely: the savage, barbarous, civilized, and enlightened. 



At the outset it should })e recognized that the only working hypothe- 

 sis the physicist can use is that of the instrumental origin of scales. 

 Helmholtz's view that the harmonics in the voice and in the tones of 

 instruments were influential in settling the positions of the notes of 

 our scale is obviouslj^ consistent with this hypothesis; and his opinion 

 that this influence acted on other scales need not be whollv rejected, 

 though some of his historical authorities were untrustworthy, and 



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