ve song played on a flute. We find so-called
"courting" flutes in Formosa and Peru, and Catlin tells of the
Winnebago courting flute. The same instrument was known in Java,
as the old Dutch settlers have told us. But we never hear of it
as creating awe, or as being thought a fit instrument to use
with the drum or trumpet in connection with religious rites.
Leonardo da Vinci had a flute player make music while he
painted his picture of Mona Lisa, thinking that it gave her the
expression he wished to catch--that strange smile reproduced
in the Louvre painting. The flute member of the pipe species,
therefore, was more or less an emblem of eroticism, and, as I
have already said, has never been even remotely identified with
religious mysticism, with perhaps the one exception of Indra's
flute, which, however, never seems to have been able to retain a
place among religious symbols. The trumpet, on the other hand,
has retained something of a mystical character even to our
day. The most powerful illustration of this known to me is
in the "Requiem" by Berlioz. The effect of those tremendous
trumpet calls from the four corners of the orchestra is an
overwhelming one, of crushing power and majesty, much of which
is due to the rhythm.

To sum up. We may regard rhythm as the intellectual side
of music, melody as its sensuous side. The pipe is the one
instrument that seems to affect animals--hooded cobras,
lizards, fish, etc. Animals' natures are purely sensuous,
therefore the pipe, or to put it more broadly, melody, affects
them. To rhythm, on the other hand, they are indifferent;
it appeals to the intellect, and therefore only to man.

This theory would certainly account for much of the
potency of what we moderns call music. All that aims to be
dramatic, tragic, supernatural in our modern music, derives
its impressiveness directly from rhythm.[01] What would
that shudder of horror in Weber's "Freischuetz" be without
that throb of the basses? Merely a diminished chord of the
seventh. Add the pizzicato in the basses and the chord sinks
into something fearsome; one has a sudden choking sensation,
as if one were listening in fear, or as if the heart had
almost stopped beating. All through Wagner's music dramas
this powerful effect is employed, from "The Flying Dutchman"
to "Parsifal." Every composer from Beethoven to Nicode has
used the same means to express the same emotions; it is the
medium that pre-historic man first knew; it