74
From Pan and His Pipes to thePhonograph
Frogs croak;Cats me-ow;Dogs bark;Sheep bleat;Cows moo;Lions roar;Hyenas laugh;
But only birds and peoplesing.All other animals simply make noises.But people can do what birds cannot.They can also make music out ofthings.
Have you ever made a cigar-box fiddle or a pin piano or musical glasses?
In the long-ago story-book times Apollo took a pair of cow-horns and fastened between them seven strings made from the cow’s skin. This was called a lyre. These strings he picked with his fingers or with a quill, making a little tinkling sound that could hardly have been very beautiful. Yet Apollo’s son Orpheus is said to have learned from his father to play so beautifully onthe lyre that the birds and wild beasts and even trees and rocks gathered round to hear him.
Pan, the god of the woods, who had goat’s horns and ears and legs and feet, tied together several whistles of different lengths and played on these as you might on a mouth-organ. This instrument was called Pan’s pipes.
The lyre and Pan’s pipes were the two earliest musical instruments. The first was a stringed instrument; the second a wind instrument. The long strings and long pipes made low notes; the short strings and short pipes made high tones.
From Apollo’s lyre we get the piano with its many, many strings. Did you ever look at the inside of a piano and see the many strings of different lengths? They are, however, not picked as the strings of a lyre or harp are picked, but hammered by little felt-covered blocks as you touch the keys.
From Pan’s pipes we get the great church organ with its pipes like giant whistles. You don’t, of course, blow the pipes with your mouth as you do a whistle. The pipes are so big you must blow them with a machine like a tire-pump, and you do this as you touch the keys.
We know what the instruments in olden times were like, but we don’t know what the music that people made was really like; there were no phonographs to bottle up the sounds and, when uncorkeda thousand years later, to pour forth the old notes once again. The music went off into thin air and was lost.
It was not until about the Year 1000A.D.that music could even be written down. Before then all music was played “by ear,” for there was no written music. A Benedictine monk named Guy, or, in Italian, Guido, thought of a way to write down musical notes, and he named the notes do, re, mi, fa, and so on. These were the first letters of the words of a hymn to St. John which the monks sang like the scale.
Another Italian is sometimes called the “father of modern music.” His name is Palestrina, and he died about 1600. He set the church service to music, and the pope ordered all churches to follow it, but the people didn’t like his music very much; that is, it was not what we call “popular.”
It was not until a hundred years later—that is, about 1700—that the first great musician lived who wrote music that was really popular, that the people loved, and that we still love to-day.
He was a German named Handel. His father was a barber, a dentist, and doctor, and he wanted his boy to become a great lawyer. But the only thing the boy liked was music.
In those days there were no pianos. There was a little instrument with strings which was playedby touching keys. This was called a clavichord. Sometimes it had legs like a table. Sometimes it had no legs and was just laid on a table.
Handel is found in the attic.
Handel is found in the attic.
Handel, though only six years old, got hold of one of these instruments, and, without any one finding out about it, he had it put up in his room in the attic of his house. After every one had gone to bed at night he would practise on this clavichord until late, when he was supposed tobe in bed. One night his family heard sounds up under the roof. Wondering what it could be, they took a lantern, and, quietly climbing the attic stairs, they suddenly opened the door, and there sat little Handel in his night-clothes on a chair with his feet reaching only half-way to the floor, playing on the clavichord.
After that Handel’s father saw it was no use trying to make his son a lawyer. So he got teachers for him, and before long the boy amazed the world with his playing. He went to England, lived there, became an Englishman, and when he died the English people buried him in Westminster Abbey, a church in which famous Englishmen were buried.
Handel “set the Bible to music.” These songs with the Bible words to be sung by a chorus of voices were calledoratorios, and one of these oratorios named “The Messiah” is sung almost everywhere at Christmas-time.
Living at the same time with Handel was another German musician named Bach. Bach played divinely on the organ as Handel did on the clavichord and wrote some of the finest music for the organ that ever has been written. Strange that both Handel and Bach went blind in their old age, but to them it was sound, not sight, that counted most. Here is another good subject for an argument: would you rather be deaf or blind?
Almost all musical geniuses have been musical wonders when they were still babies. They have been great musicians even before learning to read and write.
One such genius was born just before Handel died. He was an Austrian named Mozart.
Mozart when only four years old played the piano wonderfully. He also wrote music—composing, it is called—for others to play.
Mozart’s father and sister played very well, so the three went on a concert tour. Mozart, the boy wonder, played before the empress, and everywhere he went he was treated like a prince, petted and praised and given parties and presents.
Then he grew up and married, and ever after he had the hardest kind of a time trying to make a living. He composed all sorts of things, plays with music called operas, and symphonies, which are written for whole orchestras to play; but he made so little money that when he died he had to be buried where they put people who were too poor to have a grave for themselves alone. People afterward thought it a shame that such a great composer should have no monument over his grave, but then it was too late to find where he was buried. A monument was put up, but to this day no one knows where Mozart’s body lies.
A German named Beethoven had read thestories of the boy wonder, Mozart, and he thought he, too, would like to have a boy wonder to play before kings and queens. So when his son Louis was only five years old he kept the boy practising long hours at the piano until he became so tired that the tears ran down his cheeks. But Louis Beethoven, or Ludwig, as he was called in German, finally came to be one of the greatest musicians that have ever lived. He could sit at the piano and make up the most beautiful music as he went along—improvise, as it is called—but he was never satisfied with it when written down. Time and time again he would scratch out and rewrite his music until it had been rewritten often a dozen times.
But Beethoven’s hearing began to grow dull. He was worried that he might lose it entirely—a terrible thing to happen to any one, but to one whose hearing was his fortune nothing could be worse. And at last he did become deaf. This loss of his hearing made Beethoven hopelessly sad and bad-tempered, cross with everything and everybody. Nevertheless, he didn’t give up; he kept on composing just the same, even after he could no longer hear what he had written.
Another great and unusual German musician named Wagner lived until 1883. Though he practised all his life, he never could play very well. But he composed the most wonderfuloperas that have ever been written, and he wrote not only the music but the words, too. He took old myths and fairy-tales and made them into plays to be sung to music. At first some people made fun of his music, for it seemed to them so noisy and “slam-bangy” and without tune. But people now make fun of those “some people” who don’t like it!
I have told you in other places of painters and poets, of architects and wise men, of kings and heroes, of wars and troubles. I have put this story of music of all ages in one chapter which I have tucked in here between the acts, to give you a rest for a moment from wars and rumors of wars.
When I was a boy I never heard any great musicians play. Now you and I can turn on the phonograph any time and hear the music of Palestrina or Mozart, of Beethoven or Wagner, of dozens of other masters, played or sung to us whenever we wish; the greatest musicians become our slaves. No caliph in the “Arabian Nights” could command such service to his pleasure!