strument was the vina. This was a sort of guitar,
its body made of a strip of bamboo about eight inches wide and four
feet long. Near each end a large gourd was fixed, for reinforcing the
resonance. In playing, it was held obliquely in front of the player,
like a guitar, one gourd resting upon the left shoulder, the other
under the right arm. It was strung with six strings of silk and wire,
and had a very elaborate apparatus of frets, much higher than those of
a guitar, many of them movable, in order to permit modulation into any
of the twenty-four Hindoo "modes." The instrument had a light, thin
tone, not unpleasing. A fine specimen is figured in "Hipkins' Plates
of Rare Instruments" in the South Kensington Museum, a copy of which
may be seen in the Newberry Library.

[Illustration: Fig. 15.

JIWAN CHAH.

(Portrait of Jiwan Chah, one of the latest masters of the vina. He
died about 1790.)]

The Hindoos carried the theory of music to an extremely fine point,
having many curious scales, some of them with twenty-four divisions in
an octave. Twenty-two was the usual number. The pitch of each note in
every mode was accurately calculated mathematically, and the frets of
the vina located thereby, according to very old theoretical works by
one Soma, written in Sanskrit at least as early as 1500 B.C. When this
work first became known to Europeans, its elaboration led it to be
regarded as a purely theoretical fancy piece, and it was thought to be
impossible that practical musicians could have been governed by
theories apparently so fine-drawn. A study of the structure of the
vina, however, perfectly adapted to these theories, set all doubts at
rest. None of the intervals of the Hindoo scale exactly correspond to
our own. Harmony they never conceived. Well sounding chords are
impossible in their scales. All their music was monodic--one-voiced.

[Illustration: Fig. 16.]

There was a curious development of the musical drama in India about
300 B.C., having certain of the traits of modern opera. Several of
these ancient pieces have come down to us, but without the musical
notes. They are long, consisting of as many as eleven acts, part of
them sung, part spoken. Curiously enough, the different acts are not
all in the same dialect. The musical acts are in Sanskrit, which had
then ceased to be a spoken language for at least 500 years; the spoken
acts were in Pakrit, a dialect of Sanskrit, which likewise had ceased
to be spoken