From 《The Music of Man》 (6)

五声音阶的来历：

The overtone principle is like that of the skipping rope we all turned as children. We discovered quickly that by turning the rope faster, it could be made to divide into two or three loop segments, perhaps even five or six if the rope was long and was wielded with a strong wrist. These extra loops appeared because the rope had to follow the laws of tension and inertia, like molecules of vibrating air. When the loop segments multiplied, they turned in opposed waves, forming a continuous peak and trough. Ripples on a lake and sound waves in the air follow the same laws of the balance of opposing forces.

A string player constantly uses the overtone phenomenon, for he can produce the same effect on his vibrating string as the multiple loops in the jump rope. By touching the string at exactly its midpoint, he makes it vibrate in two opposed halves, producing a sound exactly an octave above the note to which the string is tuned. Touching the string lightly at one-third its length makes it vibrate in three equal parts, producing a sound a fifth higher still. At the quarter length, the string vibrates in four parts, giving a note two octaves above the fundamental. Those are the first three overtones. But touch the string at one-fifth its length and a critical new note appears, a major third above the fundamental, though two octaves higher up. This note completes the components of a major chord, the foundation of western harmony. It is also nature’s great secret, hidden for so long because that fourth overtone is so far above its parent. The overtone series continues upward in smaller steps, maintaining an unvarying sequence of mathematically pure ratios.

Although we can derive the entire scale, the twelve semitones of the octave from the overtone series, scales probably originated as social conventions, and there are many scales in the world that do not maintain pure intervals. Some scales may have arisen from a desire to produce evenly spaced holes on a flute or frets on a string instrument. The resultant scales sound quite unnatural to Western ears.

Such words as “octave” and “fifth” are themselves only convenient Western labels that have come into common usage because of our widely adopted seven-note major and minor scales. In this system, the note vibrating at twice the speed of another is always to be found eight notes up the scale. The fifth is another matter, for the Western scale is built of whole and half steps, again handy labels, and the distance between any five steps in the scale is not always a perfect fifth. Our scale system was probably derived from the circle of fifth, rather than from the overtones, and that circle is a closed one --- almost.

So far as we know the Chinese were the first to examine the relationship between fifths. Surviving documents, predating 3000 BC, show the importance to them of these relationships. They found that a series of fifths in a row will produce twelve separate notes before the notes begin repeating. Those twelve notes put in a series include all the semitones of our Western scale. Starting at the bottom on the piano, the circle can be played. You will find the thirteenth note at the top, seven octaves higher, is the same as the one on which you started.

They discovery of the circle of fifths was a great one to the Chinese, for they honor the number five as sacred, dividing the basic elements into five, namely earth, fire, water, wood, and metal, as they also recognize five basic human relationships and five basic kinds of grain. The Chinese used the circle of fifths to establish the five-tone pentatonic scale. Extending this series by two more intervals produced the notes needed to complete a major scale as we know it in the West. Music based on this seven-note scale did become popular in China, and later Chinese music used a scale with all twelve of the semitones we know. The Chinese also evolved a form of musical notation. Yet the five-note scale remained sacred, and was maintained for music expressing the highest moral, ethical or spiritual ideals, while the seven-note scale was designated to serve the music of the court or street.

For the Chinese, music was a tool to govern the hearts of the people. It is said in China that when there is music in the home, there is affection between father and son, and when music is played in public, there is harmony among the people. Their standardized scale was one they could duplicate on many kinds of instruments, for instances the zither-like ch'in, ancestor to the Japanese koto, both still in current use. By the seventh century BC, the Chinese poet Le Ly Kim could write, “Virtue is our favorite flower. Music is the perfume of that flower.”

呵呵，还是五声音阶的精神境界高呀！

这个Le Ly Kim 是谁？这个蹩脚的“Virtue is our favorite flower. Music is the perfume of that flower”怎么翻译回原文呢？