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Malay music, though plaintive and less excruciating than Chinese and Japanese, is very monotonous and dirge-like, and not pleasing to a European ear. The pentatonic scale is employed. The violin stands first among musical instruments in their estimation.
It is in measure 3 of the top line. The glissando here eliminates this tone also, but, by comparing this measure with the corresponding measure of each of the other verses, we find the same avoidance as in the case of the G-natural, evidence that the performers do not sense this other foreign tone. The song is therefore very markedly pentatonic in character.
The frequent and undoubtedly intentional use of the raised fourth giving the half step E-sharp to F-sharp; the persistent recurrence of the hardly primitive, minor-third harmony; and the fact that the song is not cast in the pentatonic scale, as are the other two records of the same ceremony, point to a more modern origin.
That tonality in which the upper two of the three tones constituting its tonic chord, when ranged upward from its foundation tone, are found at distances of three and seven semitones respectively from it. Pentatonic Character. That peculiar essence or quality which a melody has when it is built up entirely or almost wholly of the tones of the pentatonic or five-note scale.
In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man.
That form of tonal succession in which the tones of the melody follow rather persistently the structural outline of chords. Major Pentatonic Scale. Minor Pentatonic Scale. The pentatonic scale is markedly primitive in character. It is known to have been in use anterior to the time of Guido d'Arezzo, which would give it a date prior to the beginning of the 11th century.
If musicians of early days had this same failing, it was only natural for them to avoid that interval by eliminating from their songs one or the other of each couplet of tones which if sung would form a half step, thus their chants would be pentatonic.
The qualities thus indicated as well as those which are represented by the regular musical notation will be found listed and defined after the tabulation of qualities. There are at least two voices in this record. Possibly there were three or more singers taking part, though it is not possible to distinguish more than two. The song is cast in the pentatonic scale of A major.
The latter, the basis of Chinese music, correspond to the black keys of our piano, while the former were equivalent to the white, or diatonic, notes of our scale. That Chinese music, based on this pentatonic scale, need not be at all displeasing, is proved by many of the old Scotch tunes, which are built on the same system.
But, independently of the basic mode or scale, negro songs show here and there a strange feeling for a savage kind of lowering of this last note. The pentatonic scale simply omits it, as well as the fourth step. But the African will now and then rudely and forcibly lower it by a half-tone. In the minor it is more natural; for it can then be thought of as the fifth of the relative major.
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