THE HUMAN HAND

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2985, 24 January 1917, Page 3

THE HUMAN HAND

Ai\ T D the making of music. Wo may hold a writer in "Tlio that man. owes his superiority over the animals to tho possession of a hand, or, with Galen, that he has a hand because lie is the wisest of creatures —that our hands, in fact, make us or that we make our hands; but, on either view, the part played in music by. that member of the body is the most subtle and the most decisivo of any. And this is curious. I'or. iu the first place, the voice and the face ©spress us, in ordinary life, far more intimately than the hand does. Wo remember faces and voices all our lives, whereas it is only specialists, such as portrait painters or the police, who care to make and keep records of hands and fingers. And, iu the second place, the hand is not specially adapted for making music. Its distinguishing features are two; the ability to move tho thumb across the fingers,' by which wo pick up, sort out, and so on, and to turn from pronation to supination, and vico versa—tho muscular action, that is, by which we break a ball from the off or from the leg; and—with the exception, of course, of Carl Philip Emmanuel's discovery' about the thumb— neither of those is of much service in playing instruments. Meanwhile, its chief employment, that of closing tho fingers to grasp, is of actual disservice to tho instrumentalist, because it makes more difficult the actions he most frequently needs of raising and of separating_ the fingers by means of muscles which have been called, out of deference to him, fidioinales. That the hand is ill-adapted for making music is the vory reason it makes it. If man's oxtremities wefo aimed like tho brute's he would not have invented the arts of war by which he shows his superiority to thorn. And if his hand or voice at their untutored stage could have expressed hi™ fully, he would not have invented the arts of peace by . which men and nations axe differentiated. The voice has, incidentally, had much to combat before it could he used in musio. The natural voice rises by leap and falls by stop, its high loud and its low soft, its emission is impulsive and spasmodic, whereas music demands an even current of sound which, may be affected but must not be dominated by these tendencies. Tho triumph of voice and hand in the arts is thus seen to be part of a progress, whioh we think of as an 'upward' progress, depending on the atrophy of those parts which do not subserve a vital purpose and the development of those which do. , But the more interesting and. at first sight,- less explicable statement is that the hand has more to do in the making of music than the voice has to say. This is not true of music at any and everyparticular moment, only, of the art over xts_ whole course. We noticed {hat the voice and the face were, in the ordinary relations of life, more eloquent than the hand. Let us consider what has happened in the case'of the face. In the East they dance primarily with the face, secondarily with the arms and other limbs, and last and least with the. feet. This is not a mere diversity like their writing from right to left, or their women making love to their men. It la an endeavour to combine in one moment two elemonts of expression, the brightening or depressing of this or. that physical feature and the accelerating or retarding the motion. The eye, eyebrow, lip, neck, shoulder, and so on, move by minute gradation and in infinitely changing rhythm; and thus face and figure submit themselves to something which is closely analogous to the pitch and rhythm of music. But when, as in tho West, the feet take the lead, a new consideration oomes in. These are part of a natural pendulum, the legs; and this fact forces what was irregular into regular rhythm. Tho dance-then becomes valued for its regularity, and specialises in regular patterns, while tho "melodic" part of it becomes atrophied. The voice, on tho other hand, is pre-eminently melodic, Setting its rhythm,, but,an irregular rhythm, from the words. In the effort after regular rhythm the voice must-borrow from the feet, and its own natural rhythm then becomes atrophied. Thus voice and feet represent respectively different sides of music. • Now comes the hand. This possesses . a capacity, permissive but not neoessary, for regular rhythm. It has no capacity for melody, but it makes itself one. Armed with the power of infinitely graduating both pitch and rhythm, or in proportion as it is so armed, it is free to make all tile music which the brain 'can conceive. Thus the instrument gradually but surely, ousts from their hegemony, as we see that it has oustecTto-day, both the song and the dance. Towards the dance we feel, perhaps as tho Romans cjjd at the' zenith, of their civilisation, that it does not quite bemtnsJioJi',e hi S ,lest Part of our nature. J-he dethronement of song is a consummation we may regret, but cannot alter. It will not die, but it will bo translated.