[Footnote 1:  This fact is curious, seeing that at the present day the cultivation of music belongs to one of the lowest castes in Ceylon.]

[Footnote 2:  Mahawanso, ch. lxiv.; UPHAM’S version, p. 256.  An ingenious paper on Singhalese Music, by Mr. Louis Nell, is printed in the Journ. of the Ceylon branch of the Roy.  Asiat.  Soc. for 1856-8; p. 200.]

But unlike the soft melodies of Hindustan, whose characteristic is their gentle and soothing effect, the music of the Singhalese appears to have consisted of sound rather than of harmony; modulation and expression having been at all times subordinate to volume and metrical effect.

Reverberating instruments were their earliest inventions for musical purposes, and those most frequently alluded to in their chronicles are drums, resembling the tom-toms used in the temples to the present day.  The same variety of form prevailed then as now, and the Rajavali relates, in speaking of the army of Dutugaimunu, that in its march, the “rattling of the sixty-four kinds of drums made a noise resembling thunder breaking on the rock from behind which the sun rises."[1] The band of Devenipiatissa, B.C. 307, was called the talawachara, from the multitude of drums[2]:  chank-shells contributed to swell the din, both in warfare[3] and in religious worship[4]; choristers added their voices[5]; and the triumph of effect consisted in “the united crash of every description, vocal as well as instrumental"[6] Although “a full band” is explained in the Mahawanso to imply a combination of “all descriptions of musicians,” no flutes or wind instruments are particularised, and the incidental mention of a harp only occurs in the reign of Dutugaimunu, B.C. 161.[7] JOINVILLE says, that certain musical principles were acknowledged in Ceylon at an early period, and that pieces are to be seen in some of the old Pali books in regular notation; the gamut, which was termed septa souere, consisting of seven notes, and expressed not by signs, but in letters equivalent to their pronunciation, sa, ri, ga, me, qa, de, ni.[8] At the present day, harmony is still superseded by sound, the singing of the Singhalese being a nasal whine, not unlike that of the Arabs.  Flutes, almost insusceptible of modulation, chanks, which give forth a piercing scream, and the overpowering roll of tom-toms, constitute the music of the temples; and all day long the women of a family will sit round a species of timbrel, called rabani, and produce from it the most monotonous, but to their ear, most agreeable noises, by drumming with the fingers.

[Footnote 1:  Rajavali, pp. 217, 219.  At the present day, there are four or five varieties of drums in use:—­the tom-tom or tam-a-tom, properly so-called, which consists of two cylinders placed side by side, and is beaten with two sticks;—­the daelle, a single cylinder struck with a stick at one end, and with the hand at the other,—­the oudaelle, which is held in the left hand, and struck with the right;—­and the berri, which is suspended from the beater’s neck, and struck with both hands, one at each end, precisely as a similar instrument is shown in some of the Egyptian monuments.