s of China and other nations of
the farthest East retain the pentatonic scale in wide use, the Chinese
in their philosophical and mystical theories of music, linking the
five-tones symbolically with the heavenly bodies. It is surprising how
much variety can be achieved with those five tones. One of the most
graceful melodies that I know in all music is the popular Chinese
'lily Song' which I recorded from a Chinese actor and which possesses
the sheer beauty of outline and the firm delicacy of a Chinese
drawing. Indeed, the melodic possibilities of the five-tone scale,
containing a charm absolutely peculiar to that scale, instead of being
limited, seem almost endless.

"American Negro music, is however, by no means restricted to this
tonality, for we find a broad indulgence in the major and minor modes
of modern art, and also there are many songs in which occur tones
foreign to those scales most common of which is perhaps the minor, or
flat, seventh. Then, too, there are songs framed in the scale with a
sharp fourth; and we also find, though more rarely in Negro music, the
augmented interval of three semitones. Those of us who have noted
Arabic folk-songs are accustomed to associate this latter interval
with Semitic music; occurring as it does in African music also it
reminds us of the contact between the black population of Africa and
the Semitic peoples in the white north of the continent whose caravan
trade brought them into communication with the more savage interior,
while their ships touched at ports along the coasts and even landed
colonists on the Eastern shores, where Arab trade across the Red Sea
must have existed since early Bible times. As the age-old slave
traffic brought captives from African tribes out from the heart of
black Africa to the north, we can readily see how, since the very dawn
of history, Negro and Semitic cultures must have touched. One of the
Bantu legends in my collection from Portuguese East Africa is probably
of Semitic origin, and the song which it embodies seems also tinged
with foreign color. Without doubt, Semitic tunes and musical intervals
found their way to African ears, while, on the other side, African
Negro drum-beats and syncopations must have influenced Berber, Moorish
and thus perhaps even Spanish rhythms.

"Another characteristic of the Negro, musically, is a harmonic sense
indicating musical intuition of a high order. This instinct for
natural polyphony is made clear in t