HINDOO MUSIC. 
61 
which it was adapted. The only thing possessed by 
modern Europeans, which bears any resemblance to 
the music of the ancients, is the Gregorian canto 
fermo, modelled upon what was supposed to exist 
among the Romans before the decline of art. In this 
chant the same variety of modes exists as in the 
music of antiquity., and the same names have been 
applied to each. Modern writers usually mistake 
these modes for different keys, though they all be- 
long to one key, being composed, to speak intelligibly 
to a modern musician, of the different scales of the 
diatonic heptachord. 
These same modes exist in the Hindoo music, and 
therefore many of them will not carry a regular modal 
harmony, such as distinguishes all modern European 
music, which contains only two modes. Thus the 
Hindoos, like the Greeks and Arabs, sing only in 
unisons ; though in the native concerts I have some- 
times distinguished a third or a fifth struck upon the 
final note. But this is mere instinct ; the human ear 
naturally conceives these harmonic intervals, and this 
is so true that I have heard bands of Mozambique 
negroes, whose music is strictly that of nature, sing 
in three parts, and their ear led them instinctively 
to the common chord, and the chord of the dominant 
seventh. The Hindoos pretend to musical science, 
and are, therefore, disposed to reject that which 
Nature teaches them. The consequence is, that when 
they light unconsciously upon and sound a harmonic 
interval, with its fundamental note, it breaks the mono- 
tony of their unisons, and they consider it a blemish. 
The practice of music is universal. There appears 
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