"So vital in East Asiatic music is the delicate vacillation that dissolves the rigidity of pentatonic scales that all possible artifices have carefully been classified, named, and, by the syllabic symbols of their names, embodied in notation: ka ; that is, sharpening a note by pressing down the string beyond the bridge; niju oshi, sharpening by a whole tone; é, the subsequent sharpening of a note already plucked and heard; ké, sharpening it for just a moment and releasing the string into its initial vibration; yū, the same, but making the relapse very short before the following note is played; kaki, plucking two adjoining strings in rapid succession with the same finger; uchi, striking the strings beyond the bridges during long pauses; nagashi, a slide with the forefinger over the strings; and many others Recent investigation has made clear that this tablature is a Chinese transcription of Sanskrit symbols used in India. Indeed, the graces of long zithers, unparalleled in East Asiatic music, are nothing else than the gamakas of India, imported with the sway of Buddhism during the Han Dynasty and given to the technique of Chinese zithers, which became the favorite instruments of meditative Buddhist priests and monks."

“the comparatively large share of drums, however, indicates the neighborhood of India”

“China also passed on to Japan the ceremonial dances of India with their music, which were Japanized as the solemn and colorful Bugaku.”

“We know that two basic principles have shaped scales all over the world: the cyclic principle with its equal whole tones of 204 and semitones of 90 Cents, and the divisive principle with major whole tones of 204, minor whole tones of 182, and large semitones of 112 Cents. Bharata’s system derives from the divisive principle, and this, in turn, stems from stopped strings. But the earlier part of Indian antiquity had no stringed instrument except the open-stringed harp; no lute, no zither provided a fingerboard. India must have had the up-and-down principle, and it cannot but be hiding somewhere.”

“It seems that the modes or, better, the melodies ascribed to the modes, matter today only from the standpoint of choosing the adequate time for performance: pieces in nem are to be played between seven and midnight; sanga is the right mode for the early morning between midnight and three and for the afternoon between noon and seven; manjura belongs to the hours between 3:00 A.M. and noon. This time table is unmistakably Indian. The name salendro points also to India. It probably stemmed from the Sumatran Salendra Dynasty, which ruled Java almost to the end of the first thousand years A.D. and had come from the Coromandel Coast in South India. Thus it might be wiser to connect slendro with ragas like madhyamāvati, mohana, or hamsadhvanī than with the Chinese scale”

“In the retinue of Buddhism, it had a decisive part in forming the musical style of the East, of China, Korea and Japan, and with Hindu settlers it penetrated what today is called Indo-China and the Malay Archipelago. There was a westbound exportation too. The fact, of little importance in itself, that an Indian was credited with having beaten the drum in Mohammed's military expeditions might at least be taken for a symbol of Indian influence on Islamic music. Although complete ignorance of ancient Iranian music forces us into conservation we are allowed to say that the system of melodic and rhythmic patterns characteristic of the Persian, Turkish and Arabian world, had existed in India as the rāgas and tālas more than a thousand years before it appeared in the sources of the Mohammedan Orient.”

“When we read in Bharata's classical book of the twenty-two microtones in ancient Indian octaves, of innumerable scales and modes, and of seventeen melodic patterns and their pentatonic and hexatonic alterations, we realize that music at, or even before, the beginning of the first century AD was by no means archaic. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that India's ancient music differed substantially from her modern music.”