Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/82

66 prominence in the minds of theorists gave the note a like importance in the ears of listeners to music, the supposition is natural that the inharmonious interval Fa-Si (an augmented fourth or tritonus) would be noticed as a blemish in the scale. The pitch a hemitone below Si makes with Fa the conspicuously harmonious interval of the pefectperfect [sic] fourth, and this we may suppose would tend to be used with it. That Si was displaced in the Chinese scale and retained at both intonations in Greece may be regarded as due to the fact that in the Chinese scale it was one of the pien, a note whose exact pitch was of subsidiary importance, while in the fully developed heptatonic octave of the Greeks it stood on an equal footing with the other notes and tended to maintain its individuality.

The irregularity in the position of pien-Koung in our melodies is of a different kind. While in theory it should be 90 cents below Koung (as the Mi of the European scale remained always a semitone below Fa), it is placed by our performers from no to 190 cents below, the interval in most cases being not under 125 nor over 175 cents. The result is the division of the minor third Yu-Koung into two intervals approximating to equality. The authorities on Chinese music make no mention of this intermediate intonation of pien-Koung. In the songs given in notation by Barrow and Van Aalst the note has the normal diatonic position a semitone below Koung. In the two scales obtained by Mr. Ellis it appears that while pien-Tche is flatted in both, pien-Koung is flatted in one and sharped in the other. It is sharped in all of the scales of instruments given by Van Aalst, excepting in that of the Sheng, or mouth-organ, reputed the most perfect of Chinese instruments, where it is flatted in the lower octave and sharped in the higher. Among our performers neither Hung-Yu nor Ying-Park used pien-Koung; but it recurs and with the intermediate intonation in the two melodies of the horn-player, hereafter to be referred to. Furthermore, in giving the notation of two melodies, while the pien do not occur in either, Van Aalst remarks upon a quarter-tone deviation of the notes in performance from their theoretical intonation similar to that exemplified in the intermediate pitch of pien-Koung.