HOW TO MAKE MUSIC

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 26 November 1927, Page 9

HOW TO MAKE MUSIC

JJERE is how the first harp was ever made. The one who made it was a very old and very wise man who lived long ago, and his very long name was Pythagoras. He was going along one day for a walk, when he heard a pleasant ding-dong sound coming from a -hut near by. He looked within, and he saw a blacksmith hammering away on his anvil. The blacksmith's hammer was making the ding-dong music. When you think of it, it is not at all strange that a thing with a beautiful name like “anvil” cannot help making music. But Pythagoras heard a stranger sound than that—two long, sweet notes humming all the time in tune with the hammer and the anvil. He was puzzled about where this other sound could be coming from, until he saw four pieces of string hanging from the low ceiling of the blacksmith’s hut, A horse-shoe was tied to each string, and the horseshoes were of different sizes. These two long, sweet notes seemed to be coming from, two of the strings. Pythagoras put his ear to one of them, and just as the blacksmith brought down his hammer on the anvil, there it was—a low humming in the string, making just the same note as the anvil made. The wise old man plucked at each string with his finger, and each one gave out a different note. So he hurried away home, and he tied weights of different sizes to bits of string of the same length, and that very afternoon he had made the first harp in the world. And people gathered from all over the' country to see it and to hear it, and all of them wondered that so much lovely music should have been hidden away in ordinary pieces of string, and yet they had never known. Now that is not an old-fashioned way to make harps. 1 seem to remember that you sometimes make the mthat way still; one end of the string in your mouth and the other in your hand, a good pull to make the string taut, and there it is; and you can pluck it with your fingers and nearly play tunes on it if you are clever.

In that simple way music began. Even a pianoforte is just a number uf strings packed' in a box, only instead ot striking the strings with your fingers you strike the keyboard, and little hammers inside run up and down and strike the strings like so many little blacksmiths hammering on their anvils. Is it not wonderful that all the music we know is made out of very ordinary things? If you wish to learn something that will do you good all the days of your life, remember what was done before the first note of music was brought' out of a common length of string. What did Pythagoras do? He hung a weight to it, and hey presto! there was music. That makes us think back to the cruel days of war. For soldiers were fond of grumbling when they had not enough to do,. and when they were slack, they had no song. Yet the same men, on a cold, wet day, in the mud, amongst the noise, weighed down with their heavy steel helmets, their packs, their haversacks, equipment, rifles, bayonets, ammunition, with their feet heavy as lead and their heads aching, would lift up their voices and sing and sing for all they were worth. That was music being made out of a stretched string. Do you know what I hear a little boy's mother tells him nearly every day? She tells him about an old lady on a white horse, at a place called Banbury Cross, and she says that because the old lady has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she will have music wherever she goes. What is to hinder us all from carrying our music about with us? A great poet tells us of a little girl who did people a world of good just becuuse she was always singing. She had a heart like a singing bird, and she never knew the good she did. That is how we ought to live—so that folks may hear the sound of the harp as we pass along.

Another great man said this about p happy, singing boy he knew: “I wish,” he said, “that when your times comes and you are old< and no longer able to sing, that God, when He takes you home, will lay His hand upon your heart gently; not smiting it, but as a harper lays his open pahn upon his harp strings to quieten them.”