II. On Enharmony
It remains for me to say a few words about something that has caused much talk and even more writing: I want to designate here the harmony of the ancients, some modern peoples, and the Greeks in particular (3).
We have often wondered what this singular harmony could be, whose marvelous effects have been praised by historians and poets in turn.
This harmony is, for me, the application of the phenomenon of attraction pushed to its limits.
We would fall into the most puerile of errors if we imagined that analysts like Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and profound men like those who illustrated the century of Pericles passed before the phenomenon of the sensible without knowing and defining nature perfectly (4).
In these times when the study of the first laws seems to have occupied everyone, it would be surprising if music, regarded as the first of all the arts, music to which we gave the signal honor of regulating its principles by solemn laws, was only a collection of elements found at random.
As regards melody or the successive emission of notes, the Greeks were infinitely nearer to the absolute principle than we are, whatever our modern self-esteem may say.
The varied position of their sensitives proves this, the most audacious attempt at multiple combinations that has ever been attempted if we except perhaps the Indian series, on which we are not sufficiently well informed to establish good comparisons.
However, although it is claimed that Pythagoras found the simultaneous resonance of the octave, the fourth, and the fifth, it remains to be seen whether he had the idea of using this discovery by attaching these consonances to the melody. , to contribute to a general effect (5).
If we consider the playing of the first tetrachords, which were then used exclusively, Phrygian, Lydian, and Dorian, it is difficult to think that the use of absolute consonance could have come out of it.
Whatever has been said and may still be said for or against this question, I believe that it is at least very bold to want to resolve it definitively with the few monuments that remain to us from antiquity (6).
The Greeks had either received their entire musical system from the Indians (7) or borrowed some of its elements from a time we cannot properly assign.
They, therefore, possessed in their series, in addition to a very variable sensitivity in its relative position, one or more mobile strings, the division of which, like specific notes of Indian formulas, could vary at the discretion of the artist (8).
In all that remains to us of documents, we find, say our current authors, only the mention of a single mobile cord, the Iycanos cord. Indeed, they have not read the treatises of which they speak, for we see written throughout in the exact enumeration of the diagram, containing the lycanos or hypotonic, divided into three groups of more original attractants, the hypaton enarmonios, hypaton chromatix, hypaton diatonos. The same is true of meson and trite.
But, without going further than the hypaton, we already see the admirable analytical genius of the Greeks. Their sensitive lycanos, in the Lydian mode, can cut into half a tone, hypaton diatonos; in third tones, hypaton chromatix; finally, in quarter tone, hypaton enarmonios. That is to say that they suddenly adopted the seizable vibratory series, which the ear adopts most efficiently, without exclusion, and at the will of the performer. O moderns, take the example of the greatness of ancient ideas, and above all, before criticizing their systems, please take the trouble to read them.
Does this establish the ancient filiation of Greek music through the East, or is it, as I pointed out just now, only a fortuitous and partial borrowing?… I cannot say without going too far. Only it is evident that this question is entirely subordinate to what could be established a priori about the origin of music among the Greeks.
Pythagoras and many other philosophers had traveled to India, from where they had brought back so much knowledge that the safest thing now is to have immediate recourse to Indian sources when one wants to know the validity or the development of a disputed theory.
It would therefore be highly bizarre if Pythagoras or the others had not sought to appropriate melodic resources which suited the passionate character of their compatriots so well.
This variability of the division of the appellation notes of the Indians brought to the Greeks seems to me, without a doubt, the basis and the explanation of their enharmonic (9).
As with the Orientals, this mobile, voluntary division not only accentuates (10) more vividly the physiognomy of a piece but also, by becoming the basis of a new series, noticeably change the character of their singing.
There were, therefore, three distinct phenomena in this operation:
- The particular accentuation of the melody by means of the exaggerated bringing together or the distancing of the sensitive;
- Modulation of register, of timbre, in a word, optional elevation of the entire series, taking as a new base an interval thus changed, what we call modulating;
- In the end, a fundamental change of mode by the combination of several elements thus modified.
I will demonstrate later that these three phenomena are accepted among us in practice; the first, in truth, in an unconscious way, denotes a wealth of means by which we can be jealous.
And I understand why such discoveries, or such Foreign introductions, have been a subject of admiration and intoxication on the part of men as fond of enjoyment as the Greeks.
Now, the impassioned temperament of the Orientals and the Greeks, the absence of the help of harmony to support the melody, led the musician to employ the most violent means to express the dramatic situations which he was forced to produce.
After having given fixed sensitivities, although multiple in their combinations, we wanted even more; we wanted them to be variable and mobile, according to the composer and the subject treated.
Then, as it is at least confident that this still takes place in the East, one saw running, between three-quarter tones, an appeal intended to satisfy the needs of a problematic and jaded people.
Enharmony is therefore not, as some would have us believe, a fantasy of child musicians or the result of ignorance of keys. This is the last word of melodic attractions (11).
When in our country a singer wants to give a warm expression to what he is rendering, don’t you see with what art or what instinct he exaggerates the sensitivity of the names, on the attractiveness or the cadences (12)?
In recent times, composers have embarked on a melodic path so loaded with chromatism that in the mouth of the singer, and by the addition of the movement above, we will soon identify ourselves with the procedures employed by the Orientals. What separates us almost uniquely, and what we should rightly praise ourselves for, is that with us, there is a complete admission of simultaneous resonance. That harmony is invited, especially in the cadences, in part in the appellative series, to deploy the riches of consonance.
We are therefore making great strides towards merging these two systems that are commonly believed to be so opposed. In a few years, we will have invaded Indian enharmonic to such an extent, at least from the point of view of the subdivision of appellatives, that we will be able almost to bring them into our system, which is so rich and so precious, by the synthesis that he presents melody and harmony fortunately confused.
As for the Orientals, perhaps the Greeks will always have the glory of having conceived and laid down as a rule the free division and subdivision of names, in a word, of enharmony.
These peoples, who had perhaps begun with an equal division of the sensible, have, as much as we been forced to follow the principle of attraction in its final consequences to obtain movement in the representation of the passions.
This phenomenon of the relation of appellative divisions with movement is so striking and exact that one can follow its application from the lowest chants to the most voluptuous melodies, from the coldest people to the most intensely enthusiastic.
We would see that this divergence is contained between the similar, rigid movement and the predominant, mobile movement, brought together to the point of confusing itself with the attractants themselves.
Undoubtedly, strictly speaking, harmony is easier to obtain in a uniformly regulated series than in an ultra-mobile system. Consequently, the invention of harmony by the peoples of the North may be regarded as very probable. But to believe that the fusion of these two systems is impossible is a long way off. The rudiments of enharmony that exist among us in practice would demonstrate the opposite if necessary (13).
Indeed, by our enharmonic modulations, have we not already reached this part of the oriental system, which consists in creating other tonalities on intervals less than a semitone?
By the mechanism of the singer and any instrument with a key or free emission, do we not obtain their second process, that of the optional division of appellations?
So there remains only the real change of fashions, by these elements thus modified!… Why shouldn’t the future give it to us?
I, therefore, believe that we can accept without fear the succession of the ancients, of the Greeks in particular, and admit the Orientals into the scientific competition so as to give our attractions a more passionate and lively sensibility.
It is from the observation of such rational principles that I realized the coldness of instruments with fixed keys, which have no refuge except in the rich and multiplied combinations of harmony, but with the emotion that the voices, generally so mobile in the execution of the appellatives, imprint on the audience.
What a difference between the sound produced, with equal talent, by a pianist and a singer or a violinist!
This is the secret of ancient or foreign harmony, a process often exaggerated, vitiated even perhaps sometimes, but whose prodigious action on men who, emerging from the barbarism of yesterday and the listening to elementary intervals, stiff, without connection, found themselves suddenly witnessing the marvels of a melody clothed with all the tricks of attraction, with all the charms of a scholarly passion.
This is what historians and poets have praised and sung at will in the chronicles or the verses they have left us. Such is also the explanation of the prodigies attributed to Orpheus and so many others, who had found in the bottom of an enthusiastic heart the application of forces that nature only gives us in an absolute state.
But, to understand and apply this knowledge, one must not dare to wallow in this unfortunate prejudice of absolute tonalities in the successive order; for then there is only a ridiculous intolerance that distances us from the musical communion of other peoples and prevents all progress and all fusion of ideas.
Such is the preliminary considerations that I thought it my duty to give in this brief review of the great ideas on which music is founded among all peoples.
The desire that they suffice to properly prepare the mind for what is to follow.
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