Hindoo music is almost untranslatable to Western ears, but Sir W. Jones, in an essay on the musical modes of the Hindoos--to be found in the third volume of the _Asiatic Researches_--makes an attempt to render one of their most popular songs. The original, of which he also gives a copy, looks like a mixture of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese characters, and how far our notation represents it it is impossible to say; for, though Sir W. Jones was an erudite Oriental scholar, that of itself would not render him a good translator of Hindoo music. The air is a song of love and spring, and the measure is indicated, "rapid and gay:"
Kindred to Semitic and Hindoo music, though venturing on bolder intervals, is Chinese, Persian and Arabian. The almost untranslatable airs of India assume in China something like an artless melody. Their smallest intervals are semitones, which have been in use, like everything else in China, from time immemorial. Nevertheless, in the diatonic series of seven intervals the Chinese usually avoid the two semitones by omitting the fourth and the seventh, so that their scale consists really of only five intervals, and as they regard F as their principal key (just as we regard C as ours), the Chinese scale stands thus:
This scale is, however, by no means confined to China, but is met with in several Asiatic countries--Japan, Siam, Java, etc. In order to judge how it affects the character of music, I have copied the following Chinese air and Japanese song from Carl Engel's _Researches into Popular Songs and Customs_:
[Illustration: CHINESE AIR, "MOO-LEK-WHA."]
Arabic music, which is Asiatic in its foundation, shows decided traces of the wider civilization and greater independence of character to which this race attained. The delicate gradations of sounds are still adhered to in the form of multitudes of grace-notes, but the intervals are longer and the melodies more decided. The overloading of the melody by an excessive use of trills and grace-notes by Persians, Arabians, and even Spaniards, in their popular music, indicates some common sentiment; and it is remarkable that the European Jews preserve this same Oriental ornamentation in the vocal performances of their synagogues. Numerous examples of Arabic music may be found in Lane's _Modern Egypt_. This writer professes great admiration for it, and says he "never heard the song of the Mekka water-carriers without emotion," though it consists of only three notes: