Page:The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan.djvu/26

 2 THE MUSIC OF SOUTHERN INDIA.

ingenuity of the performer — the pecuhar rhythm of the music — the extraordinary scales used — the recitatives — the amount of imitation — the wonderful execution andmemory of the performer — and his skill in employing small intervals as grace. Then when we hear old" Slokes "and •' Ghuzals," songs written hundreds of years ago, sung with the same sweet dreamy cadences, the same wild melody, to the same soft beats of little hands, and the same soft tinkle of the silver cymbals, we shall perhaps begin to feel that music of this kind can be as welcome and tasteful to ears accustomed to it as the music of the West, with its exaggerated sonorousness, is to us ; and so our contempt will gradually give way to wonder, and, upon acquaintance, possibly to love. For this music, let us remember, daily gives pleasure to as many thousands as its more cultivated European sister gives to hundreds. There is hardly any festivity in India in which some part is not assigned to music — and for religious ceremonies its use is universal. Since the Vedic times it has been cultivated as an art. The hymns of the Rig and Yagur Vedas were set and sung to music ages ago. The Vedic chant, composed in the simple Sanskrit spoken three thousand years ago, and handed down from generation to generation for more than thirty centuries, has a thrilling effect upon a cultivated Hindu mind. The Vedic chant is to Hindus what plain song is to us. For this ancient chant — like plain song — is bound up with the sacred ceremonials, and is wedded to language alike sonorous and dignihed. And the place where it is heard, for it is only heard in the temple, is considered so holy, and the strain itself is so simple and devotional, that all who hear it cannot fail to be impressed.^

Indian music, like its sister art in Europe, seems to have undergone many changes before reaching its present stage. In remote ages the art seems to have been highly cultivated, and musicians were held in great esteem ; but under the Mussalman dynasty, and owing to the almost perpetual strife between petty princes, music, like other arts, through want of encouragement, fell almost into abeyance. There is, therefore, little information to be had concerning the music of those times.

From early periods, however, many learned and elaborate treatises (mostly in MSS.) upon the art yet remain. The later of these show that even then music had passed through several stages of transition. Since the Sangita Parijata, which is believed to be one of the latest of these Sanskrit

' An interesting explanation of these chants is given by Mr. A. C. Burncll. Ph.D., in his ".rshey- abrahmana" [Mangalore, 1876], and reprinted in Tagore's " Hindu Music from 'arious Sources." This explanation will enable anyone to note the Sania Vedic chant, as printed in the Bibliothcca Indica edition, in ordinary notation.