Tone- And Scale-Systems

The music of any people not knowing the use of musical—at any rate, melody-producing—instruments, is, of course, purely vocal, and it appears that, in such cases, we cannot speak of “scales” in the ordinary sense of the word, let alone of tonal systems. Singing alone, uninfluenced by musical instruments, possesses no definitely fixed intervals; it knows only of higher or lower, the chief thing being the movement upwards or downwards, and not so much the absolute size of the intervals produced. As Lachmann quite rightly remarks somewhere, the same may be said of dancing; there, too, stress is laid only on the direction and the order of sequence of the steps, whereas their length is relatively unimportant.