Until recently the study of Byzantine history and civilisation has had to fight against an almost insuperable prejudice. The whole Byzantine world was considered as petrified, bloodless and decadent both in its life and in its artistic creation, and gifted scholars refused to waste their energy on a study which seemed unimportant. Although a large number of Byzantine manuscripts were brought to Europe in the seventeenth century and, in spite of the publication of Allacci's Studies in the Liturgical Books of the Greek Church, Goar's Commentary on the Euchologium and Montfaucon's Palœographia Grœca, yet knowledge of these works and the study of Byzantine art were confined to a small number of people and aroused no regular interest. Sixty years ago a famous German scholar—Professor W. Christ, of the University of Munich—in his Preface to the Anthologia Grœca Carminum Christianorum apologised for deserting the “elegance and fine freedom of the poets of Greece and Rome for the thorny bypaths of mediæval Christian verse.” The prefaces, too, of later works dealing with Byzantium all contain the same apology, the author wishing to make it clear that he has undertaken his task in a spirit of scientific enquiry rather than out of conviction or enthusiasm.

First of all, I want to explain my title, for on seeing it in cold print it seemed to me to be a bold title for anyone to take or to dare to discuss Musical Origins. I should perhaps rather have said the “Problem of Musical Origins in Light of the Musical Practices of Bushman, Hottentot Bantu.” I must, however, start with some sort of preamble and propose to begin with a short elementary lesson in South African geography from the point of view of the distribution of the native peoples.

It will be obvious, at the outset, to everyone that Keyboard Technique has developed in accordance with the instruments which were available to the performers. I do not propose to enter into a detailed survey of the instruments: most of them are probably known to my hearers, and I need only mention those that may have anything to do with this particular subject of technique. In examining what writings there are, however, it will generally be found that the writers were almost unanimous in their desire to make technique a means to a musical end, rather than a mere mechanical display. I will point this out in the course of this paper. The only instruments I need mention are the clavichord, clavecin; harpsichord and hammerklavier, the modern piano coming under this last category (hammerklavier).

When we listen to a piece of music, whether it be a fugue by Bach, a song by Schubert, or a symphony by Beethoven, the actual physical, objective, stimuli which reach our ears consist of incredibly complicated pulsations of air pressure. These produce equally complicated vibrations of the tympanum or ear-drum, and so set up successions of nervous impulses in the brain. But our subjective experience of the music, the thing that we actually hear, consists of a logical and meaningful sequence of harmoniously interrelated auditory impressions, possessing form and unity both as a whole and in detail. How then does this series of discrete air vibrations, which are produced by the musical instruments or voices of the performers, become transformed and organised into the mental thing that we call music? In other words, what is the psychological nature of our perception or cognition of music?

So much has already been written on the antithesis of “classical” and “romantic” music that it may seem a waste of time to approach the subject again. I certainly have no intention this afternoon of re-opening all the old controversies, or even of attempting to summarize the attempts that have been made to define exactly the meaning of these two familiar adjectives. My object is to look at romantic music—more especially the earlier romantic music—from a point of view which seems hitherto to have been neglected.

At the Haslemere Festival of 1931, one piece of String Music was so enthusiastically received by the audience that it had to be played three times over. A contemporary account says:—