us, and their followers, is discarded in favour of a style
more naturally in touch with human emotion. These folk songs
have a strong similarity to Scotch and Irish songs, owing to
the absence of the fourth and seventh degrees of the scale.
If they were really sung to the accompaniment of chords, the
resemblance would be very striking. The Chinese singing voice,
however, is not sonorous, the quality commonly used being a
kind of high, nasal whine, very far removed from what we call
music. The accompaniment of the songs is of a character most
discordant to European ears, consisting as it does mainly of
constant drum or gong beats interspersed with the shrill notes
of the _kin_, the principal Chinese stringed instrument. Ambros,
the historian, quotes a number of these melodies, but falls
into a strange mistake, for his version of a folk song called
"_Tsin-fa_" is as follows:

[Figure 01]

Now this is exactly as if a Chinaman, wishing to give his
countrymen an idea of a Beethoven sonata, were to eliminate
all the harmony and leave only the bare melody accompanied by
indiscriminate beats on the gong and a steady banging on two or
three drums of different sizes. This is certainly the manner
in which the little melody just quoted would be accompanied,
and not by European chords and rhythms.

If we could eliminate from our minds all thoughts of music and
bring ourselves to listen only to the _texture_ of sounds, we
could better understand the Chinese ideal of musical art. For
instance, if in listening to the deep, slow vibrations of a
large gong we ignore completely all thought of pitch, fixing
our attention only upon the roundness and fullness of the sound
and the way it gradually diminishes in volume without losing
any of its pulsating colour, we should then realize what the
Chinese call music. Confucius said, "When the music master Che
first entered on his office, the finish with the _Kwan-Ts'eu_
(Pan's-pipes) was magnificent--how it filled the ears!" And
that is just what Chinese music aims to do, it "fills the ears"
and therefore is "magnificent."[03]

With their views as to what constitutes the beautiful in music
it is not strange that the Chinese find our music detestable. It
goes too fast for them. They ask, "Why play another entirely
different kind of sound until one has already enjoyed to
the full what has gone before?" As they told Pere Amiot
many years ago: "Our music penetrates through the ear to the