book extract: Music and the Power of Sound by Alain Daniélou

Chapter 7: The Western Scale and Equal Temperament (p. 121) "Added to this, the generalised use of equal temperament, which vastly oversimplifies musical structures, has led people to forget completely the most elementary acoustic realities and, by distorting all the intervals, has rendered the meaning of chords vague and unclear. It is generally said that the ear can recognise the true interval represented by the tempered interval. This is a fact; but each ear makes a different adaptation according to individual tendencies, and the same chord may have a different significance for different people according to their mood. The meaning of an accurate chord, on the other hand, is determined absolutely and perceived by all. The result is that Westerners have more and more lost all conception of a music able to express clearly the highest ideas and feelings. They now expect from music mostly a confused noise, more or less agreeable, but able to arouse in the audience only the most ordinary sensations and simplified images." [...] "The relations of sounds should be able to express, not the noise or the external appearance of things, but their essence. The knowledge of these subtle relations has always been considered the basis and the true object of art in the East." [...] "For example, when the Indian mode of the rains, Megh-Mallar, is played, no sound will attempt to imitate the noise of raindrops or of thunder, but the relations between the sounds will be so similar to those between the elements when a storm is approaching that not only trained musicians but even animals will inevitably feel the rain in the air. [...] "Fabre d'Olivet explains that voices are: ... compelled by certain instruments - particularly those used in musical education such as the piano, the harpsichord, the harp, or the guitar - to follow artificial intonations, and in turn compel all the other instruments that accompany them to take those intervals in the same way, so as not to be out of tune. Consequently, our diatonic genus is sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect, our chromatic is always incorrect, and we have no enharmonic genus. We must admit that if, as has been suggested by Zarlino, Salinas, and Martini, and as Rameau believed, we adopted such a system in order to have some sort of harmony, our harmony surely does not deserve the name, and it would have been better to keep its Gothic name of counterpoint; we must also realise that our symphonists have no reason to be astonished if their modern music does not produce the effects of ancient music, since they do not hesitate to infringe the true laws of nature in this way and to corrupt the sensitivity of the ear to the point of habituating this organ to receive three wrong sounds out of the diatonic seven, never to hear a correct chromatic sound, and to be completely ignorant of the charms of the enharmonic genus. Had the Greeks had a musical system similar to ours, I would find it difficult to believe in the marvels of which they were proud, because should see a definite contradiction between the weakness of the cause and the strength of the effect... Following such deformations, the Western musical language finds itself artificially aloof from acoustic realities and from the laws on which the metaphysical correspondences of sounds are based, a fact that renders it incomprehensible to other people. Therefore when circumstances compel peoples like the Malayans or African Americans to adopt the Western musical system, they quickly transform it back into logical modal forms. This is why their songs, though usually very simple, have such an emotional appeal." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHn6a-_Dt5w&ab_channel=RajuAsokan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y&t=33s&ab_channel=ArmandD%27Angour