214 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XI. No. 267. 



sense that spoken language is conventional. 

 The listening musician is constantly try- 

 ing to find the composer's meaning in a 

 passage always imperfectly rendered ; so he 

 is being constantly trained to correct in- 

 stinctively the sounds heard so as to fit 

 them into his scale ; then more or less con- 

 sciously he notes the inter-relations of the 

 sounds, the key and mode, modulations, 

 rhythm, etc., for if these elementary things 

 are obscure, the musical thought must be 

 still more so ; the case is closely parallel 

 with the understanding of a spoken dis- 

 course. All this training and more is im- 

 plied in the term ' musician.' Klauser's 

 purpose is to promote such training and 

 make the student conscious of it : Parry 

 throughout implies that it is the basis of 

 musical intelligence, and sometimes rec- 

 ognizes it rather explicitly : "Wallaschek 

 shows something of it : Fillmore and Miss 

 Fletcher are saturated with it. 



Now when a musician thus trained hears 

 foreign music he cannot ordinarily help 

 treating it in the familiar way, and assum- 

 ing both that his notation is suitable, and 

 that his familiar ideas are applicable. He 

 reads into it his own notions and disregards 

 what seems foreign to his established sys- 

 tem. The students of savage and oriental 

 languages have passed through and beyond 

 this stage of development ; so to-day the 

 laity as well as scholars know that the ut- 

 most facility in and appreciation of one's 

 mother tongue confer no ability to spell the 

 words or understand the meaning of a for- 

 eign language ; why then should a high 

 musical training be thought })er se to confer 

 the ability to understand the music of a 

 foreign race? We constantly hear that 

 ' music is a universal language,' but the 

 usual criticisms on foreign music or expres- 

 sions of disgust with it show that the say- 

 ing is substantially false, and that the words 

 of a learned Chinaman to Amiot a century 

 ago are far truer : " The airs," he said, " of 



our music go from the ear to the heart, and 

 from the heart to the soul ; we know them^ 

 we understand them ; those that you play 

 for us have not this effect." Fortunately a 

 few writers have at least recognized that 

 such terms as major and minor, modula- 

 tion, tonality and harmony have very rarely, 

 if ever, any applicability to foreign music ; 

 for instance, Mr. Parry does so in a passage 

 in Grove's Dictionary, holding that these 

 terms do not apply to anything inherent in 

 this non-harmonic music, but only to the 

 effects produced by it on hearers with Euro- 

 pean training. 



It is just here, over the interpretation of 

 the sounds heard, or the choice of a stand- 

 point from which non-European music shall 

 be judged, that the conflict is sharpest and 

 most irreconcilable between professed musi- 

 cians and the few scientific students of com- 

 parative music. Of the writers under review 

 Parry has little and Klauser has nothing 

 to indicate that there is a conflict, but they 

 define admirably the advanced musician's 

 standpoint ; the others dealing exclusively 

 with non-harmonic music should recognize 

 the conflict and justify their choice of a 

 standpoint if they would be accepted as 

 authorities. But neither Wallaschek nor 

 those from whom he quotes have, except 

 rarely, made even the slightest attempt to 

 find any other standpoint ; while Fillmore 

 repeatedly, triumphantly, and with italics 

 declares that there is no other, saying for 

 instance, " These melodic aberrations to 

 which I have referred are easily and nat- 

 urally accounted for by reference to their 

 natural harmonic relations, and in no other 

 way" (p. 61). His able paper is practi- 

 cally a challenge to every scientific student 

 of musical problems ; one must accept it 

 and fight to victory in his own mind, or 

 give up the contest for the application of 

 scientific methods of research ; for in effect 

 it denies that the methods which have 

 revolutionized the study of the history of 



