No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Interpretation of Greek Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
Inadequacy of our Theory. To whoever may desire to understand the music of ancient Greece, I would recommend that he put away from his mind that sense of superiority which our progress in counterpoint, harmony, form and orchestration has engendered, and devote his attention to the shortcomings of our music, for they relate to those very matters concerning which Greek music has the most to teach us.
Our music has come down to us from remote ages through the Greek system. The first stage in its progress was marked by the collection of a multiplicity of Harmonies and modes, not unlike those upon which the classical music of India is based. Of the diatonic scales, some were soft, employing septimal or soft intervals, and others were hard, employing semitones, and major and minor tones, differing among themselves in the order in which these intervals were strung together. The Greeks may have added to this collection. Their chief contributions to musical progress, however, were instrumental heterophony and the science of intervals. They were driven to the use of the former by the tyranny of the ‘metrici’. Thus the long and short of Greek poetry led indirectly to the harmonic system of music, which is one of the main achievements of European civilisation. The foundations of musical science were laid by Pythagoras. The results of his labours were soon apparent in the classification of the enormous number of scales in use, the adoption of a musical notation based upon an intricate system of correlated keys, and the art of modulation. In the break-up of Roman and Greek civilisation, the subtle distinctions between the various Harmonies were the first features of the music to go under. Curiously enough, the innovations introduced by the master minds of Greece survived in the art of modulation, and the contrapuntal tradition. A new series of keys was invented. This degenerated, under the growing influence of keyed instruments, and the craze for unlimited modulation, into the musical freak of equal temperament, in which a scale, grotesquely out of focus, is set up as a standard and basis of theory. Players on the pianoforte and organ perform tempered music in tempered tones to admiring audiences.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1922
References
1 The use of the ditonal numbers for the notes of the Lydian key, by late and ignorant authors (such as ‘Anonymus’), is no evidence, in my opinion. Want of space prevents my doing more than presenting a bald outline of the views I hold regarding the history of music.
2 Intervals 7 to 9 are all varieties of the major third.
3 A low sharp is here followed by a low natural, a low natural by a low flat, and so on. If both are naturals or flats, the lower note takes the lower variety of accidental. The varieties of hard diatonic are therefore easily described.
4 I have often heard really musical soloists indulge in septimal harmony. In Swiss jodeling for two voices, I have heard it in the lower part.
5 A scale might take tetrachord X followed by tetrachord Y. Thus two tetrachords might explain four scales, namely, xx, yy, xy, yx.
6 Dr.Macran, Harmonics of Aristoxenos, Oxford, 1902, p. 189.Google Scholar
7 This is the major tone. The diesis of Aristoxenos was a conception of no practical value.
8 According to the classification herein followed. ‘Quarter-tone’ is here used in its general sense.
9 See the remarks of Aristoxenos above quoted.
10 Maeran, p. 207.
11 Anonymus de Musica, edited by Bellermann, (Berlin, 1841).Google Scholar
12 Prob. xix. 20. See also Prob. 36.
13 This term is preferred to ‘dominant,’ being free from ambiguity.
14 Prob. xix. 334.
15 Or the nete.
16 Bryennios (circ. 1400 A.D.) Wallis, John, Opera Math. iii. 259.Google Scholar Oxon. 1699.
17 Meibom. p. 37; Macran, 128. 193.
18 Heraclides was a pupil of Plato.
19 As the notes are named by Alypius the mese is always the base of a Dorian tetrachord. The names have regard to the theoretical structure of the keys. They are, in that sense, functional names. Each mode, however, had its own mese, the mese of position. This is clear from Ptolemy's scales, and from other indications.
20 J. H. S., XXXIII (1913), p. 35.
21 I. e. the E, B and A modes.
22 Author of Harmonik and Melopoie (1863 and 1886) and Musik des Griechischen Alterthums (Leipsic, 1883).
23 Some recensions of the hymn to Calliope contain instructions which seem to refer to the rhythm of the music.
24 Mr.Goodell, (Chapters on Greek Metric, Yale University Press, 1901)Google Scholar criticises this theory.