The Origin and Development of Musical Scales [pp. 324-343]

THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MUSICAL SCALES. 333X
history of music the rhythmic form is always the matrix wherein
melodies are shaped and cast.
Many facts illustrative of this theory might be adduced from
the data we have of barbarous music; and thus the intrinsic
probability of the genius of melody from mere rhythm, as certified
by collateral evidence drawn from the usages of extant savage
peoples, leaves little doubt that the same process was gone
through with among the ancestors of modern musical nations.
If so, the discovery being once made that different tones may
be successively combined to advantage, the independent expressiveness of melody may be supposed gradually to have asserted
itself, taste and skill in its construction to have increased with
the increase of knowledge and taste in other directions, certain
intervals and certain co-ordinations of intervals to have been
tolerated, others discountenanced, and thus in time a scale to.
have been established owing its existence to rhythmic tendencies
and its character partly to natural acoustic facts and partly to.
national peculiarities of aural sensitiveness.
We have now penetrated to the second and perhaps more:
practical-question, Why have certain intervals been preferred to,
others? Helmholtz has devoted much space to the answer, and
we can do little more than offer a skeleton of his elaborate
theory.
This theory has for its Physical Basis the great doctrine of'
partial tones whereof our author is the chief expounder.
Its Physiological Basis is the doctrine that the sensory
mechanism of the ear is essentially a set of resonators, which
are individually sensitive to and discriminative of certain stimuli,
such as partial tones.
From these two doctrines is deduced a great fundamental
law, that of Tone-relationship as influencing scale-production.
This law is of wide influence, but is limited in its action by
two subsidiary elements which are more or less dependent upon
race-differences in point of auditory refinement and general
melodic taste. These limitations are, first, the smallest tolerable
interval between two consecutive notes, and, second, the desire
to secure uniformity or equality in the length of successive in-.
tervals.
The various possible combinations off these factors give us,