Page:The Music of India.djvu/44

 the pentatonic was the more primitive scale among all peoples.

It is the custom of Saman singers to-day to call the higher tetrachord uchcha — 'high', and the lower nicha — 'low'; but it seems probable that, while these terms may have originally only referred to a difference of position, later they came to mean a different style of singing. Saman singers to-day seem to sing chromatically in the uchcha notes and diatonically in the nicha notes.

'The voice is prior to the instrument. This is prima facie so probable that it can hardly be said to need proof. It is implied in the statement of Aristoxenus, that the natural laws of harmony cannot be deduced from instruments.' At any rate it is true that songs precede scales. It is impossible to think that a mother waited to sing a lullaby until a scale had been worked out in which to sing it. When people sing simple songs, they often know nothing about the intervals used in them, but they sing them all the same. We cannot say how people began to find them out. In out-of-the-way places singers use very few notes. Children use fewer than adults, country people fewer than townspeople, and flat-land dwellers fewer than mountaineers. It was a long time before the fifth was used and longer still before the octave came into use. The songs of primitive people were made up of a few musical intervals. Then, as instruments were joined to the voice, they got accustomed to the third, the minor tone and the semitone. Then they began to sing diatonic series such as S R G M, or S r G M, and so on. Or they might proceed by a leap of two semitones, and then make the fourth, as in S r g M ; or else the leap might come after the first semitone, as in S r G M. Then they might find a third way by using intervals of less than a semitone, as in S r g M. So the interval of the fourth became filled up partly by experiment and partly by theory.

The typical ancient Indian instruments were the drum (dundubhi), the flute (murali), and the vina. The vina was used mainly in accompaniment, and the flute by itself, as when Krishna charmed the gopis of Brindaban. As all