Curt Sachs excerpts

I was just reading Curt Sachs' "Some Aspects of Musicology" and I
thought I should share a few excerpts with the group. There are some
very curious statements which I'm not repeating but he makes a few
important observations.

More curious is the tenacity with which the bagpipe has clung to its
distinctly Arabian scale with whole tones and three-quarter tones in the
midst of a world of diatonic scales. Wherever the old Oriental
instrument appears on its journey to Scotland--in the Mediterranean,
Spain, or Brittany--the foreign scale is preserved; and it is quite an
experience to watch the guards march into Buckingham Palace, the band
playing "correctly" and the bagpipes "in Arabic."
Oriental influence in the Middle Ages was evidently not limited to the
instruments, and not even to their particular scales, no instrument
travels without its music. . . . [Sachs, Curt "The Lore of Non-Western
Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology," Three Essays by . . . Arthur
Mendel, Curt Sachs, and Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New
York, 1957, pp25-6]

. . . Our notes deceive us: performance style, which they cannot
express, counts for more than the bald arrangement of steps that they
set forth. How dare we suppose that the Christian Spaniards and
Proven�als sheared the Moorish melodies of all their characteristic
traits! Incidentally, one picture, and a very late one, provides a
strange confirmation: in the famous altarpiece of Ghent (c. 1425, that
is, in the time of Dufay), van Eyck painted the singing angels grouped
around St. Cecilia with, above the nose, the quite un-European but
typically Oriental creases which result from nasal singing and which we
find so often five thousand years ago in the portraits of Egyptian
singers and in the living Orient of today. (Commerical photos of the
altar seldom show this detail.) [Sachs, Curt "The Lore of Non-Western
Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology," Three Essays by . . . Arthur
Mendel, Curt Sachs, and Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New
York, 1957, p26]

Feeling the impact of Oriental music, a few persons began to realize
that Western music was not unlimited. It dawned upon some
musicologists, perhaps for the first time, that our great achievements
in harmony, polyphony, and orchestration had involved sacrifices in
other fields; that Europe had compressed into the conventional major and
minor the incredible richness of melodic types and modes that still
flourished in the East; that the West's even, unalterable semitones,
forced into a uniform "equal temperament," had supplanted a wealth of
variable tunings. Under the strait jacket of harmonic motion our melody
had become a poor device connecting related chords, while Western
rhythm, its counterpart infinitely subtle in the East, had degenerated
into a system that did little more than mark binary or tenary accent
groups. [Sachs, Curt "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of
Musicology," Three Essays by . . . Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, and
Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p30]

The epoch-making publication of this method took place in Ellis'
"Tonometrical Observations on some Existing Non-Harmonic Scales," a
paper first printed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (1884) and
reprinted in the following year in the Journal of the Society of Arts
under the simplified title "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations."
In his own words, "The final conclusion is that the Musical Scales is
not one, not 'natural,' nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the
constitution of musical sound so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz,
but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious." [p43]