Curt Sachs

 

 

 

 
  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 bagpipers "in Arabic. [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p25-26]   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. The medieval melodies that we see on paper, the archaic quadrangular notes so neatly written on staff lines or in the spaces between, look innocently diatonic and European--just as do the native melodies that modern Orientals try to write down in Western notation. But were those medieval melodies actually sung as they sound when played on an equal-tempered piano? Hardly. Give them the many unwritable shades of Arabian intervals from note to note, now a little wider, now narrower than ours, try to give them the color, the intonation, the strange mannerisms of Oriental singing, and the whole illusion of Western style is gone. [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p26]  
 
  A new East-West connection through percussion music derived indirectly from the conquest of Constantinople and the consequent advance of the Turks westward across the Balkan Peninsula, which became a threat to the Continent. For two hundred year and fifty years, their noisy bands of shrieking shawms and wild percussion spurred on the Turkish soldiers in march and battle; . . . . [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p28]   . . . 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 ternary accent groups. [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p30]  
 
  . . . where is the music of Egypt, Babylonia, or Central America? The monuments stand--the music has vanished. No script tells us what the music was like in millennia B.C. [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p34]   . . . after studying with a native music teacher, he [Guillaume-André Villoteau] came to recognize that correctness of intonation was not a monopoly of Western man (who in the course of a long evolution had changed the size of his musical intervals and wound up with an incontestably incorrect "equal temperament"). The European system was by no means--in Hullah's words--"nearer the truth than any other." [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p39]  
 
  . . . The microtones in an octave (twenty-two in India against our twelve), the suble shades of intonation, the countless mannerisms and fleeting ornaments which give life to Oriental melody, cannot be rendered. Simplification becomes falsification. [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p41]   . . . We should not forget how much of musical perception is a matter of suggestion. [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p42]  
 
  . . . Alexander J. Ellis . . . he used the objective methods of scientists and an ingenious computing system of Cents or hundredths of an equal-tempered semitone. [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, 42-43]   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 Scale 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." [Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology, Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p43]  
 

 
       
 
Curt Sachs in Wikipedia

Curt Sachs As A Theorist for Music Museology

Jubilatores, Medieval Musical Performance by Barry Ebersole, Ph. D.
                                                            
           
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