MUSIC. The Greek (se. rixv70 from which this word is derived was used comprehensively for all the arts of the Nine Muses. Contrasted with yugvaarto) (gymnastic) it included the culture of the mind as distinguished from that of the body. Thus the singing and setting of lyric poetry formed but a small, if a central, part of a "musical" education which ranged from reading and writing to the sciences of mathematics and astronomy besides all the arts of literature. The philosophers valued music both in the ancient general sense and in our re stricted sense, chiefly as an educational element in the formation of character ; so that we obtain little light from them on the pure aesthetics of the Greek art of musical sounds.
The present article deals mainly with the musical art-forms matured by European civilization since the 14th century. More ancient music is discussed frankly as beyond our power of appre ciation except in the light of prehistoric origins. Our Western art of music stands in the unique position that its language has been wholly created by art.
Music owes but little to nature in the form of acoustic science, and still less to the sounds' that occur outside works of art. It is already a mature musical art that selects the acoustic facts, just as in painting it is art that determines the selection of optical facts. Wise critics have, since Ruskin's day, abandoned the attempt to settle a priori how much of nature an aesthetic system ought to digest ; and music differs only in degree from literature and the plastic arts as to independence of nature.
Yet the difference is often important. Perspective existed as a science before it was taken up by painters, and as a human experience before it became a science. The naïve Western spectator has seen enough of it in pictures to make him resent its neglect, whether in modern art or in the masterpieces of China and Japan. In music the nearest analogy to perspective is the system of tonality developed by the great composers from Alessandro Scarlatti to Wagner. (See HARMONY.) Every step in its evolution has been fiercely contested ; and even twenty years after the end of Wagner's long career not every responsible musician was ready to admit Wagnerian tonality as a legitimate enlargement of the classical system.
If we set aside language and the organized art of music, the power of distinguishing sensations of sound is no more com plex than the power of distinguishing colours. On the other hand sound is the principal medium by which most of the higher ani mals both express and excite emotion ; and hence, though until codified into human speech it does not give any raw material for elaborate human art, it suffices for bird-songs that are as long prior to language as the brilliant colours of skins, feathers and flowers are prior to painting. Again, sound as a warning or a menace is an important means of self-preservation; and it is produced instantly and instinctively.
All this makes musical expression a pre-human phenomenon in the history of life, but is unfavourable to the early development of musical art. Primitive music could mysteriously re-awaken instincts more elemental than any that could ever have been ap pealed to by the deliberate process of drawing on a flat surface a series of lines calculated to remind the eye of the appearance of solid objects in space. But the powers of music remained magical and unintelligible even in the hands of the supreme artists of classi cal Greece. We may be perfectly sure that if the Greeks had pro duced a music equivalent to the art of Palestrina, Bach or Beet hoven, no difficulty of deciphering would have long prevented us from recovering as much of it as we have recovered of Greek literature. Some enthusiasts for Oriental lore assure us that long ago the Chinese knew all about our harmonic system but aban doned it after they had exhausted it. This need not worry us. The Oriental aristocrat conceals in his politeness a profound contempt for our efforts to patronise his culture; and that con tempt is justified when we show such ignorance of our own music as to suppose that a music of similar calibre could have utterly disappeared from a living nation whose most ancient plastic art and literature commands our respect and rewards our study. When we trace the slow and difficult evolution of our harmonic system we cease to wonder that it was not evolved sooner and elsewhere, and we learn to revere the miracle that it was evolved at all.