Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/189

No. 2.] in any of them. An impression of want of unity, doubtless in part due to this cause, seems in general to be produced by Chinese music. Barrow calls their melody "an aggregation of harsh sounds," and Ambros speaks of it as "well-nigh devoid of sense and connection." Yet a closer examination of our songs brings to light a tendency to the embodiment of a certain form of less pronounced tonic structure. In most of them the note of the scale on which the composition ends has also been somewhat more frequent than the others during its course. Moreover, in these cases it is either the note a fifth above, or the note a fifth below, the supposed tonic (its dominant or sub-dominant), which is apt to be the next most prominent note. The songs showing this quasi-tonality are given in the following list, together with the note acting as tonic in each: All the notes of the scale excepting the pien being represented here, and Tche (which in these songs has the pitch d'  of the primal Lu, Huang-chung) more often than the others, the inference suggests itself that it may rather be to this absolute pitch d'  than to any particular pentatonic note that the Chinese tend to attribute tonic functions. The two pien, which are always subsidiary, are the notes called Fa and Si in the European scale. It was these two notes, it will be remembered, that were excluded from the position of predominant note in the music of mediæval Europe, and as far as our songs are evidence, exactly the same degree of freedom of tonic choice exists in Chinese musical practice.

In the course of the present study we have had occasion to note an unexpected number of points of contact between the European and the Chinese musical systems. The fixation of a seven-step scale by the progression of fifths, and its extension to form a duodecimal octave, have been recognized as independent achievements of the Chinese since the work of Père