Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/184

168 structure was transmitted to China from Europe, it must, if we trust their accounts, have been assumed by European music at a time long anterior to the rise of the harmonic style. Whether original or acquired, therefore, the existence of this characteristic in Chinese musical theory gives reason for the belief that other causes beside their harmonic capacity may be operative in directing the growth of diatonic music into two forms, major and minor.

During the middle ages a new set of names was given to the notes of the Chinese scale, according to Van Aalst in the fourteenth century and by the Mongols. Among them was one which Amiot writes Kong, Van Aalst giving the same spelling Kung to both this name and the ancient one called by Amiot Koung. The new name Kong was applied to the note anciently called Yu, three hemitones below Koung. Of the habitude of the flatted pien-Tche, which Van Aalst tells us was also derived from the Mongols, and has since become general in China, Amiot says nothing. We have ourselves found it in all the records of Chinese scales (Barrow, Van Aalst, Ellis, and our own songs) in which we have been able to establish the identity of the notes at all. Making this change in the position of pien-Tche, the scale appears with its mediæval and ancient names as follows:

Mediæval: HoSseYChang TcheKongFanHo $$\cdot$$ (T) $$\cdot$$ (T) $$\cdot$$ (H) $$\cdot$$ (T) $$\cdot$$ (T) $$\cdot$$ (T) $$\cdot$$ (H) $$\cdot$$ Ancient: Koung Chang KiopTcheTcheYupKg Koung

Through this change, the scale still remaining diatonic, Koung is no longer the note below the group of three, but that below the group of two tones, and Kong is not, as Yu was, the note intermediate to the group of two, but that between the upper two of the group of three. In a word, Koung has become Do, and Kong has become La: the ancient nomenclature marks out the European major; the mediæval, the European minor, mode.

The similarity in their Chinese names renders it antecedently probable that the two notes Do and La have in later times shared between them the position of theoretical primacy