Polyphonic music was long in growing. To understand clearly, one must examine it from its very _beginning_ in Greek _magadizing_, referred to in Lesson V. Music for many centuries was, in all its most important phases, entirely vocal. The ancients, probably because of the crude forms of their instruments, valued the human voice as the most suitable means of expressing the feelings through music, thus causing the peculiar phenomenon of the extremely late development of dissonances. While instruments can easily perform even the harshest of the dissonances, it is almost impossible for untrained voices to sing other than the more simple consonances. For this reason, the dependence on the voice as practically the only medium for the expression of musical ideas forced the cultivators of music to use the simple consonances of the octave, fourth and fifth. In its earliest stages music was entirely melodic and was limited to the use of one distinct melody, so that, no matter how many were singing, but _one melody_ was employed. Soon arose the problem of accommodating the voices of boys and men to the same melody. It was manifestly impossible to have men and boys sing in unison, because of the difference in the compass of their voices; so the Greeks hit upon the plan of causing them to _sing in octaves_, a plan which science sanctioned, for had not Pythagoras proven that the octave, after the unison, was the most perfect consonance? This the Greeks called Magadizing. Why the Greeks, knowing as they did the other consonances, did not magadize in the fourth and fifth cannot be explained; the only argument that can be advanced is, that their melodies were so limited in range that the voice of any man, whether tenor or bass, could without difficulty reach the highest or lowest tones of a melody in unison. While magadizing among the Greeks cannot be counted as a great advance toward the realm of polyphony and harmony, yet it was the first important step in the evolution, and as such, is important. So far, the voices singing _simultaneously_, though at a different pitch, and moving together in _similar_ time values, followed monophonic methods.