music" would have described it even better; for as Darwin says,
man _sang_ before he became human.

Gerber, in his "Sprache als Kunst," describing the degeneration
of sound symbols, says "the saving point of language is
that the original material meanings of words have become
forgotten or lost in their acquired ideal meaning." This
applies with special force to the languages of China, Egypt,
and India. Up to the last two centuries our written music
was held in bondage, was "fossil music," so to speak. Only
certain progressions of sounds were allowed, for religion
controlled music. In the Middle Ages folk song was used by
the Church, and a certain amount of control was exercised
over it; even up to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
the use of sharps and flats was frowned upon in church music.
But gradually music began to break loose from its old chains,
and in our own century we see Beethoven snap the last thread
of that powerful restraint which had held it so long.

The vital germ of music, as we know it, lay in the fact that
it had always found a home in the hearts of the common people
of all nations. While from time immemorial theory, mostly in
the form of mathematical problems, was being fought over, and
while laws were being laid down by religions and governments
of all nations as to what music must be and what music was
forbidden to be, the vital spark of the divine art was being
kept alive deep beneath the ashes of life in the hearts of the
oppressed common folk. They still sang as they felt; when the
mood was sad the song mirrored the sorrow; if it were gay the
song echoed it, despite the disputes of philosophers and the