Miscellaneous - This Day That Age   

dated December 30, 1953: Music, East and West

Mr. John R. Marr of the Annamalai University, speaking on "Oriental Influence on Western Music" at the Experts' Committee of the Music Academy at the P.S. High School, Mylapore, said "A study of the classical music of India by Western musicians, with acquaintance with the best of European music on the part of Vidwans here, can save classical music from the increasing stranglehold of film music. The music of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans is steeped in oriental musical theory and practice. Until the 18th century, Western music was nearer to that of the East in having a model basis. That was destroyed by the advent of `equal temperament', in which the pitch of individual notes in the scale is predetermined by mechanical means, and the intervals, therefore, are fixed. The appearance of large orchestras separated Western music still further from oriental practice. With Turkish expansion into the Balkans in the 15th century and after, the liturgical chant of the Orthodox Church came more and more under Near-Eastern influence. Earlier, a similar development in religious chanting had taken place in Spain where, under the tolerant rule of the moors, the Mozarabic rite of the Catholic Church was evolved. The distinctive, highly-ornamented chant largely disappeared, and the rite survived only in Toledo where the music was of later date and inferior quality. Debussy, the French composer, was not unaffected by the tonal system of Javanese music in evolving his whole-tone scale. The principle was the same in either case, the division of the saptaha or octave into a number of equal intervals, 5 in the Javanese system, and 6 in Debussy's whole-tone scale.

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