ÁREAS DE TRABAJO DEL PERSONAL DE SERVICIOS GENERALES

Europeans’ first awareness of pentatonicism apparently originated with the mis-sionaries’ increasingly detailed accounts of China in the eighteenth century.

t h e p a s t o r a l - e x o t i c p e n t a t o n i c ❧ 4 9

very little concerning Chinese music, and what he did report was uninstructive and unfavorable. Ricci’s contempt for monophony, for percussion, and for what he identifies only as “a lack of concord, a discord of discords,”¹⁰strongly resem-bles contemporary accounts of Turkish music.

The whole art of Chinese music seems to consist in producing a monotonous rhythmic beat as they know nothing of the variations and harmony that can be produced by com-bining different musical notes. However, they themselves are highly flattered by their own music which to the ear of a stranger represents nothing but a discordant jangle.¹¹ Over one hundred years later, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s four-volume Description . . . de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735) improved on Ricci with three pages on the subject of Chinese music, albeit a music still deplored as “so imperfect that it hardly deserves the name.”¹²Despite this autho-rial condescension, Du Halde represents a significant milestone with his inclu-sion of five transcribed “Airs chinois,” three of which are strictly pentatonic in the major mode (with the remaining two strongly minor-pentatonic). Du Halde does not comment on these examples, however, and the only description he gives regarding musical detail concerns certain Chinese monks who “never raise and lower their voice a semitone, but only a third, a fifth, or an octave.”¹³This formulation falls just short of coherence, for while he explicitly excludes the semitone, he also implicitly excludes the whole tone, thus apparently describing a triadic (or at least tertial) music. If it was pentatonicism that Du Halde attempted to convey, this was a near miss.

Inadequate as Du Halde may have been as an analyst (to say nothing of an ethno-musicologist), his short essay became required reading for later writers, for whom the transcriptions no doubt provided an incalculable entrée. The first of Du Halde’s airs would become famous through its adoption by Rousseau in his dic-tionary article “Music,” offered so as “to put the reader in a position to judge the different musical accents of peoples. . . .”¹⁴Rousseau himself added nothing by way of comment on the tune and in fact introduced some confusion with the erroneous and inopportune inclusion of an f
within what had been a strictly G-pentatonic melody. Rameau, whose interest in Chinese music was entirely theoretical, made passing reference to Du Halde in his last major work, the 1760 Code de musique pra-tique, which contained an appendix, “Nouvelles Réflexions sur le principe sonore.”

Here the theorist explicated both Pythagorean and Chinese music theory and their common foundation in the progression triple, which is to say, scale generation by perfect-fifth chains. (The triple proportion 3:1 corresponds to the interval of a perfect twelfth, while the ratio 3:2 gives the perfect fifth.) Rameau appears to have been the first to claim that the Chinese “want there to be only five tones in their Lu,”¹⁵but pentatonicism per se interested him less than did the question of tuning, for the “triple progression” yields intervals at odds with those of Rameau’s cher-ished corps sonore (essentially, the overtone series). The systems of the ancients thus

prove the universality of the triple progression while also demonstrating the addi-tional need for the quintuple progression, which yields the pure thirds of just into-nation, in accordance with the corps sonore.¹⁶

In the course of these observations, Rameau did pause to describe the Chinese system. Apparently working from an inadequately translated Chinese treatise—this the product of the young missionary Joseph Marie Amiot’s pre-mature efforts¹⁷—Rameau produced two competing schemes, a whole-tone scale and a pentatonic scale:

One of [the Chinese sources] gives it in this arrangement

sol la si ut dièse re dièse mi dièse

3 27 243 2187 19683 177147

one of the most ludicrous arrangements imaginable. But another author gives it as fol-lows, in which only two missing notes are needed to agree with our scale, except for the thirds, which are found to be out of tune compared to two major seconds.

sol dièse la dièse ut dièse re dièse mi dièse

6561 59049 2187 13683[sic] 177147¹⁸

Fortunately Rameau’s abstract speculations were complemented by a rare organological specimen whose tuning matched the second of these scales,

an Orgue de Barbarie, brought from the Cape of Good Hope by M. Dupleix, who was kind enough to give it to me, and upon which can be executed all the Chinese airs copied in music in the 3rd volume of R. P. du Halde . . . which sufficiently proves that this last Lu has reigned for a long time in China.¹⁹

Although these claims are in fact mutually contradictory—certain non-pentatonic passages in Du Halde’s airs would be unplayable on the instrument described—

Rameau provides the first explicit account of pentatonicism, one that touches upon both theory and practice.

Abbé Roussier took up Rameau’s investigation of ancient music, placing the pentatonic scale within a succession of scales, from the primordial three-note

“Lyre of Mercury” to the diatonic “Lyre of Pythagoras.”²⁰Roussier differed with Rameau, however, on a most fundamental level: whereas Rameau interpreted the Chinese triple-progression as referring to frequency, Roussier insisted that it refers to string length, thus prescribing a descending scale in the minor penta-tonic mode, mi–re–si–la–sol–(mi).²¹ That so profound a disagreement could exist between these two thinkers gives some indication of the dearth of practical knowledge on the subject at the same time that it underscores the modal ambi-guity inherent in the few pentatonic examples in circulation at the time.

The disagreement ran deeper still, as the question of ancient scales impinged on a lightning-rod issue of the Enlightenment: the extent to which different t h e p a s t o r a l - e x o t i c p e n t a t o n i c ❧ 5 1

and the Pythagoreans developed their systems independently of one another, but Roussier, with his unflappable skepticism toward Chinese music, proposed instead the following sweeping historical inference: “The defect of this [whole-tone] system and the imperfection of their [pentatonic] scale, whose gaps always seem to call for other tones, make it quite easy to see that these two remarkable systems are each but as debris of a complete system, which I attribute to the Egyptians.”²³This “complete system” is none other than the twelve-tone scale, which supposedly spawned both Chinese pentatonicism and its tonal comple-ment, Western diatonicism.

In fact, as Joseph Marie Amiot revealed in his 1780 Mémoires concernant l’his-toire . . . des Chinois, the twelve-tone scale had always been a chief preoccupation of Chinese theorists.²⁴Intending to redress misconceptions arising from his ear-lier work, Amiot offered a considerably more careful and nuanced treatment than any previous expositions, the fruits of his two subsequent decades living among the Chinese and studying their music. Amiot described the Chinese sys-tem in detail as an essentially heptatonic scale within a twelve-tone universe, from which two notes—the auxilliary “pien” tones—had been banished by the

“coarse scholars.”²⁵ Continuing the ethnomusicological debate, Amiot con-cluded in direct opposition to Roussier that it was the Chinese system that trav-eled to the ancient West, not vice versa. In any case, for a musician who devoted his life to China, Amiot displayed no more sympathy for the music of his adopted home than did his less informed predecessors.

I can say that [Chinese airs] greatly bored me, I hope that they will not have the same effect on those who take the trouble to decipher them. Here are several others that I give notated only in our [i.e., the Chinese] manner.

From all I’ve said until now, I conclude, and the reader will no doubt agree with me, that the Chinese are enormously little advanced in an art that today has been taken to its highest point of perfection in our France in particular.²⁶

As for practical information concerning Chinese music, Amiot transcribed only a single example into Western notation, a pentatonic “Hymne en l’honneur des ancêtres.”²⁷Nevertheless, Amiot represents the beginnings of an earnest treat-ment of Chinese music theory.

Charles Burney, also seeking to correct and clarify previous writers, declared Rameau’s major-mode interpretation of the five-note scale to accord with the Chinese music he had studied, including the most famous of Du Halde’s airs.²⁸ Burney introduced further elements to the anthropological questions sur-rounding pentatonicism. For one thing, he appears to have been the first to equate the Chinese scale with what he called “the Scots scale.”²⁹Furthermore, according to Burney’s reading of Plutarch’s reading of Aristoxenus, the original Greek Enharmonic genus probably corresponded to a gapped diatonic scale, which in certain modes could have displayed this same anhemitonic five-note

construction. Apparently wary of anthropological speculation, Burney exercised caution in drawing conclusions, but he is the first writer for whom pentatoni-cism bridges, rather than divides, East and West. He considers the pentatonic scale both “natural” and “ancient,”³⁰as well as immune from the intonational difficulties presented by 4 and 7.³¹It must be said, then, that Burney stands as the first commentator to demonstrate any sympathy to either Chinese music or to the pentatonic scale, a fact that can perhaps be explained by the associations he perceives with the more “legitimate” musical cultures closer to home.

Nevertheless, his attitude is ultimately derogatory, dismissing ancient scales as

“mutilated” and likening their practitioners to the “Lipogrammatists of antiq-uity, who wrote long poems without the admission of a particular letter.”³²

Whatever cultural interconnections Burney detected apparently escaped Benjamin de Laborde, whose 1780 Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne con-tained among its musical spoils twelve mostly pentatonic Chinese tunes as well as a strictly pentatonic Irish tune (the latter begging for comment). Laborde rehearsed the involved theoretical derivations of Roussier and Amiot, as well as the by now conventional interpretation of Chinese practice as (what we would today call) pentatonic. It is understandable that future interpreters of Chinese music would emphasize the latter more than the former, when the simplicity of pentatonicism is so easily described: in correcting Rousseau’s errant f
, Laborde firmly claims that most Chinese music “is composed of only five notes, and has as elements only that which the Chinese call the five tones, and which are here sol la si re mi, in which there is neither fa nor ut.”³³

Notwithstanding such unambiguous simplifications, the understanding of Chinese scales seems to have been far from unanimous even in the nineteenth century, judging from two prominent writers. Berlioz, reporting on a concert in London, admitted both his ignorance and his curiosity regarding Chinese scales: “My interest in hearing [the famous Chinese singer, the ‘Small-footed Lady’] centered in the manner of the Chinese tonality and division of the scale.

I meant to find out whether, as so many people have said and written, they dif-fer from ours. After my experience I concluded that there is no truth in the report.”³⁴(Unexplored by Berlioz is the question of what, precisely, would con-stitute scalar difference. If the music he heard contained pentatonic scales—a fair, if unknowable possibility—one cannot say to what extent the open-minded composer would have deemed them exceptional.³⁵) Meanwhile, in 1840 Fétis issued an expanded edition of his La musique mise à la portée de tout le monde, in which a new chapter on exotic scales describes the “Chinese and Indian scale”

as F-Lydian.³⁶Later in his career, however, Fétis developed a deeper interest in non-Western scales and described Asian music in greater detail, referring to its lack of semitones as its “most distinctive feature.”³⁷ Unlike his predecessors, Fétis’s disdain for this feature derived unabashedly from his own theoretical out-look, in particular his insistence upon what he felt were absolute laws of tonal-ity. Thus the Chinese “underestimated the necessity of this interval of the semitone, without which no musical art is possible, no sentimental emotion t h e p a s t o r a l - e x o t i c p e n t a t o n i c ❧ 5 3

the same forms, and thus, monotony.”

Fétis’s doctrinal convictions were matched at the time by more empirical writ-ers such as Carl Engel and Hermann von Helmholtz, who celebrated what they understood to be the pentatonic scale’s curious ubiquity. The substantial discus-sion of the pentatonic scale in Engel’s 1864 The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (apparently the originator of the term itself³⁹) is notable for being organized around the scale per se, rather than around a particular musical tradition. Engel calls the resemblance of Chinese and Scottish music “quite inexplicable,” while acknowledging the common “traces” of the pentatonic scale in each tradition.

He further identifies the scale in Burmese and Javanese music, children’s songs, and an Ethiopian harp.⁴⁰ This apparent universality even caused Engel to remark upon the lack of pentatonicism in printed music from Calcutta, attribut-ing this to Western “corrections.”⁴¹We thus observe a recognition of the validity and value of other musical cultures (even if ultimately a “totalizing” one), indeed, a concern with authenticity.⁴²Although both the universalist and prim-itivist tropes gained widespread favor in the twentieth century,⁴³commentators at the end of the nineteenth century had learned to be less decisive in their the-orizing, humbled by a sharp increase in data. Hence Alexander Ellis, as if in response to Fétis and Helmholtz, concludes that the world’s scales are “very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious,”⁴⁴while Hugo Riemann, alluding to the problems confidently tackled by Rameau and Roussier, self-consciously evades the question of scalar priority among the ancients.⁴⁵

No doubt contributing to this trend was an increase in opportunities like the one Berlioz described: performances of non-Western musics more or less unmediated by scholasticism. These same performances inspired the most famous upsurge of Western pentatonicism, that of the Impressionists. And while the more canonical examples of nineteenth-century pentatonicism occurred around the same time and later, the history of pentatonic usage among Western composers in fact extends back to the final years of the eighteenth century. That history forms the subject of the next section.