Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 149.djvu/546
man seeks by music to strengthen the weakness of his soul; the thoughtless one uses it to stifle his fears." Theoretically, therefore, music is held in reverence. "One of the nine tribunals which have charge of the general affairs of the empire supervises the musical rites and ceremonies. The Mandarins of music rank higher than those of mathematics, and have their college in the enclosure of the Imperial Palace." Notwithstanding the wholesale destruction of musical treatises and instruments in the year 246 B.C., the library at Peking is said to contain 482 works on the subject of music, chiefly most abstruse theories; and the Imperial Board watches over all new compositions in order that the style of ancient music may be preserved, and that which in bygone ages was prescribed for every evil in life may be rigidly adhered to. Thus music, like all other arts and sciences in China, is cramped by the strait-waistcoat of antiquity.
Never were practice and precept more curiously divorced than in this extraordinary reverence for "the spiritual principle represented by the sound of music," as distinguished from "the material principle, represented by the instruments themselves." And yet the Chinese believe music to have been reduced to an art by the Emperor Fu Hsi, 2852 B.C., and to have been further developed about a hundred years later by Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor. Hence in the oldest musical scale the lowest note was called Emperor, the next Prime Minister, a third Loyal Subjects, and so on.
In the year 2284 B.C. the Emperor Shun (himself a most erudite composer) appointed as the Censor of Music a certain Kouei, whose music was so pathetic that the wild beasts were spell-bound, and gathered around him to listen, a thousand years before they paid the same tribute to Orpheus.
Now wealthy nobles have domestic musicians; and troops of wandering minstrels, largely consisting of blind men, wander about the country armed with drums, castanets, flutes, clarionets, two-stringed violins, three-stringed and moon-shaped guitars, all of which they try—most ineffectually—to play in unison, with a result truly appalling to Western ears. These orchestras, however, attain their highest capacity of ear-torture when accompanying theatrical representations—the one ideal of excellence apparently consisting in the amount of noise which can be produced. At other times Chinese music is both shrill and monotonous to a degree. Its pitch is always considerably higher than our own, and the melodies are neither major nor minor, but waver between the two.
The basis of all Chinese music is the division of the octave into twelve tones called Lüs. These were in very early times—about B.C. 2700—represented by a combination of twelve pieces of bamboo, of the same size but of various lengths. Afterwards these were made of copper, and when these were found to be affected by atmospheric changes, marble or jade was substituted, as being in no measure affected by heat or cold, dryness or humidity. These Lüs were used solely to determine the pitch of the music, and so regulate all the instruments in an orchestra.
This use of sonorous stone for musical purposes is almost peculiar to China. The Siamese have marble flutes; and it is recorded that the ancient Peruvians had a musical instrument of green stone, about