A Popular History of the Art of Music

5000 B.C. The form of this instrument is given in Fig. 16. It must have been some time before the Mohammedan invasion, for they brought a rude violin back to Arabia, from whence it came into Europe after the crusades. They had many forms of guitar, instruments of percussion, and the varieties of viol, as well as trumpets and the like. The national instrument was the vina. This was a sort of guitar, its body made of a strip of bamboo about eight inches wide and four feet long. Near each end a large gourd was fixed, for reinforcing the resonance. In playing, it

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ery old theoretical works by one Soma, written in Sanskrit at least as early as 1500 B.C. When this work first became known to Europeans, its elaboration led it to be regarded as a purely theoretical fancy piece, and it was thought to be impossible that practical musicians could have been governed by theories apparent

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g, part spoken. Curiously enough, the different acts are not all in the same dialect. The musical acts are in Sanskrit, which had then ceased to be a spoken language for at least 500 years; the spoken acts were in Pakrit, a dialect of Sanskrit, which likewise had ceased to be s

from India in European museums, but as they are all of absurd and impossible acoustical conception, besides being most likely of comparati

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at; thereby reached through thy care they will become mild and reasonable, and the unmanageable ones able to receive dignities without arrogance or assumption. This teaching must thou embody in poems, and sing them therewith to suitable melodies and with the play of instrumental accompaniment. The music must follow the sense of the words; if

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tirely unlike any other of which we have accounts, saving the Japanese ko-ko, which was most likely derived from it. The ke is strung with fifty strings of silk. Originally it had but twenty-five, but in the reign of Hoa

re harmonic compromise, which they have never learned to use understandingly. Chinese music has always been monodic, and they use a great variety of melodic shadings composed of intervals of small fractions of a step. These they call lu. There are movable bridges which can be placed in such way as to divide the strings of the ke at proper proportions of its length for producing the lu. The places for the fingers upon the finger board are marked by small brass points. Besides the intonations due to stopping the

eties of instruments, including many trumpets; an unexampled wealth of instruments of percussion, and a few of the ruder types of the violin kind, which seem to have come in from India or Thibet by the way of the Buddhist monks

actory, should be made official and never afterward changed. This principle, taken in connection with the limited powers of their chief instrument, accounts for the small progress they have made in music within the past 2000 years. It must be remembered, however, that our knowledge of the music of this count

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in their way. The chief instrument of t

perfect guitars, a few rude violins, and the usual outfit of trumpets, reed pipes and instruments of percussion. Lik

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