A brief interlude, and the pandanus choir gives voice again,
stronger and resonant; the companions of the coco-nuts join lustily, the
strain reverberates from the wet lands below, resounds through the
forest, and is lost in the mellow distance of the tea-trees. And so the
sound rises and falls, swells and dwindles away in chords and harmonies,
until presently every amphibian is alert and tremulous with emotion and
emulation. If an attempt is made to analyse the music, you may discover
sounds sharp as those of the fife, deep and hollow as drum-beats,
sonorous and acrid, tinny and mellow.
I have heard that those who are not disciples of Wagner find it
necessary to undergo a process of education ere they acquire an
unaffected taste for the composer's masterpieces. Possibly those who
have not listened, wet season after wet season, to the light-hearted
chant, may be inclined to suggest that there can be no such thing as
music in the panting bellows of a North Queensland frog. But music "is
of a relative nature, and what is harmony to one ear may be dissonance
to another." The Chinese opera proves that "nations do not always
express the same passions by the same sounds.
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