388 The Evolution of Music. 



tain questions regarding ancient musical scales and nota- 

 tion, which perplex the ablest critics. 



In music, as in all the arts, a consecutive historical dis- 

 cussion of the subject must begin with the Greeks. That 

 the Greeks, being of Indo-European stock, were indebted to 

 the East for the rudiments of their music is beyond ques- 

 tion. But it was a surpassing excellence of the facile and 

 flexible Greek mind that it transformed and amplified what- 

 ever it inherited or acquired. In Greece music was exalted, 

 from the earliest legendary era, from the condition of a 

 mere pastime, the accompaniment of sensuous indolence, to 

 rank with poetry and the highest aspirations of philosophy 

 Of this the beautiful legends of Apollo Citharaedus, of 

 Apollo and Marsyas, of Amphion, Arion, Bacchus, Orpheus 

 and the Sirens, the latter the originals of the Melusine 

 and Loreley of Teutonic mythology, are ample proof ; and 

 still more the fact that instruction in music from the ear- 

 liest times was made a necessary part of the education of 

 the young, becoming thus inseparable to the Greek from 

 the experiences of daily life and the never-failing inspira- 

 tion to martial and religious fervor. 



Yet music among the Greeks , so far as we can discover, 

 never attained to the dignity of an independent art, but was 

 uniformly associated with the choral dances, with choral 

 declamation in Greek tragedy, or with poetical recitation 

 and rhapsodizing, and as an accompaniment only, having 

 no significance as an art outside of these. For composition 

 in pure tone they seem to have been deficient in faculty or 

 interest, though it is not safe to judge by the fact merely 

 that no specimens remain to us. The rhapsodizing con- 

 sisted in the recitation of epic or lyric poems, in a monoto- 

 nous chant of rising and falling tones. The accompany- 

 ing music was of the kind called accented i. e., note against 

 syllable which forbade the carrying of a single tone over 

 several syllables. Such enchaining of notes to syllables was 

 destructive to the working out of melodic ideas in tone to 

 their full extent, and yet that melodic form existed to some 

 degree seems a necessary inference from the variety of 

 stringed and wind instruments in use. Prof. Neumann, in 

 his History of Music, gives an ode of Pindar set to ac- 

 cented music, the genuineness of which is vouched for by 

 Prof. Bockh. But the question must remain largely specu- 

 lative. 



The Eomans borrowed their music, as they did their phi- 



