The World's Earliest Music Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and Sumer

The structure of the Scale so far as was necessary for the development of the Greek modes was comprised in The Disjunct or Greater System Complete; yet at various times the exte...

The Song of Linus is heard to-day in the land of Egypt; the sacred melody played on the double flutes in ancient days survives without change, but no player on these pipes exist...

The finder of Lady Maket’s flutes, Mr. Flinders Petrie, did not coincide with me in the opinion I had formed on the method of blowing, mainly on the ground that no reeds were fo...

The Lady Maket took possession of her latest residence with the appropriate ceremonials befitting a lady of her position; and as she had contemplated frequent excursions from he...

In considering questions of early origin and of direction of human intelligence, there is no point of more importance to bear in mind than the allowance of long periods for the...

The _Sheng_ as the parent of organs, the original exemplar of free reeds, always greatly interested me, and I was desirous of obtaining a knowledge of its scale and methods; but...

Art is always the superfluous. Food and shelter are the first necessaries, they drive man into direct courses of activity; he becomes a fruit gatherer, a hunter in forests, a hu...

“Most things in Greece are subjects of dispute,” so wrote Pausanias, and his word for it may be accepted freely. As it was in his day (writing in 174 A.D.) so it is in ours; lea...

The next development of Greek ingenuity in the construction of flutes came in a remarkable guise, showing a contrast as great as our ships in mail and armour present to ships th...

The Japanese are a curious people, blending as they do in their manners and customs, in their ways of thought and mental tendencies, in their childish acceptances and intellectu...

The fingers of the hand upon the pipes having decreed in a practical way the first scale of musical sounds, very naturally it would come to pass that an instrument with strings,...

The human interest in the past never dies, its hold upon us increases with the growing years, and every gain that is made to the store of knowledge does but add to the zest with...

Flutes I hold to be without doubt the earliest of wind instruments. They are found all over the world; no race however ancient, no tribe however rude, but possesses some instrum...

The stringed instruments which are of Chinese origin are but few in number, and they are not capable of producing any great volume of sound. They have several forms of guitar—a...

The latest discovered Delphian tablet can well claim to be the only authentic record yet brought to light of old Greek music, since it is the original and not a copy of a copy....

What a merry lot those _Subulones_ were, piping to song and dance and good cheer. I have been laughing over an Etruscan picture of one of these jovial fellows laying down on the...

Wherever man is molested by dreams of the night, there, in every land, will be found some form of pacification of the spirits of the dead, that they may not cause harm to surviv...

Music by inspiration. Yes, that is it,—the very thing we want, what we are all longing for; so little of the truly inspired music comes newly to refresh us as the birth of the d...

Four flutes were found at Pompeii, and they were all of one pattern, of greater length, yet following the same system as in that latest Greek invention illustrated and described...

“The Glorious!” So Pindar names the flute player Midas the Sicilian, who had twice obtained the laurel wreath by his performance on the flutes at the Pythic games. It is in his...

In the land of Myth there occur many landmarks that project their shadows into dim distances, telling with no uncertain indications that the land of Fact is a much more extensiv...

The Chinese have always been fond of seeking the similitudes and contrasts existing between everything in heaven and earth. So far as they had attained in astronomical knowledge...

Trumpets are amongst the very earliest of musical instruments, yet remote as is their date they throw no light on musical scales of the period of their use. Nevertheless for the...

What! didn’t you know? I thought that everybody knew that. Why not have asked before? Could have told you at any time. That is the way that secrets have of coming out,—“promisku...

Bells, Chimes and Gongs are held in high esteem by the Chinese, they are indispensable in their Ceremonies and Ritual, in their Festivities, national and social. So ancient is t...

This chapter is a pendant to that on “Midas the Glorious.” It is an afterthought which my long familiarity with free reeds has given birth to. One day I chanced to buy a child’s...

collection (Fig. 64). It is supposed to be in the hands of Erato, she holds it against her left shoulder, not as is the custom with our modern players of harps, resting on the r...

Geographically the three empires of China, Japan and Siam, may be considered as one region, and therefore, without doubt the _Sheng_, the _Sho_, and the _Phan_ have a common ori...