A Popular History of the Art of Music: From the Earliest Times Until the PresentMathews, W. S. B. (William Smythe Babcock)
History
A Popular History of the Art of Music: From the Earliest Times Until the Present
Mathews, W. S. B. (William Smythe Babcock)
Music -- History and criticism
Only two treatises upon music have come down to us from the ninth
century. The first is by a monk, named Aurelian, in the abbey of Reome
or Montier-Saint-Jean, in the diocese of Langes, who appears to have
lived about the year 850. His book, called "_Musicae Disciplina_," in
twenty chapters, is a compilation of older anecdotes and theories,
throwing no light upon the actual condition of the art in his day. The
sole remaining work of this period was by Remi, of Auxerre, who had
opened the course of theology and music at Rheims in 893, and
afterward at Paris in the earlier years of the tenth century. His
book, like the preceding, is wholly devoted to the ideas of the
ancients.
II.
This brings us to the first writer on music, during the Middle Ages,
whose work throws any important light upon the actual practice of the
art in the period when it was written, namely, Hucbald, a monk of the
convent of St. Armand, in the diocese of Tournay, in French Flanders.
Gerbert gives two treatises upon music, as having come down to us from
this author. Nevertheless there is reason to doubt the genuineness of
one of them--whereof presently. The first of these, the so-called
"Treatise," from a manuscript in the library of the Franciscan convent
at Strassburg, collated with another from Cesene, bears this title:
"_Incipit Liber Ubaldi Peritissimi Musici de Harmonica Institutione_."
The other is called "_Hucbaldi Monachi Elonensis Musica
Enchiriadis_," or "Manual of Music, by the Monk Hucbald." The former
work is of little interest, and if a genuine production of Hucbald's,
probably belongs, as M. Fetis suggests, to his earlier period, when he
was still teaching at Rheims, along with his former classmate, Remi,
of Auxerre.
The manual of Hucbald is not to be regarded as a complete treatise
upon music. It has three principal subjects, namely: The formation of
a new system of notation, the tonality of plain song, and symphony, or
the singing of many voices at different intervals--in other words,
harmony.
In treating the scale he divides it into tetrachords, precisely
according to the Greek method, as far as known to him, and he nowhere
appears to perceive the inapplicability of this division to the
ecclesiastical modes. For representing the sounds of the scale,
divided into four tetrachords, Hucbald proposed the Greek letters,
which in effect, would have been a notation of absolute pitch, with
the farther disadvantage of ignoring the harmonic principles of unity
already discovered, and in fact involved in his own method of
enlarging a two-voice passage by adding a third at the interval of an
octave with the lowest.
He recognizes six kinds of symphony; in reality he employs only three,
the others being reduplications. His symphonies are those of fourths,
fifths and octaves. In all parts of his work but one he uses the term
diaphony as synonymous with symphony; _there_ he gives its ancient
meaning of dissonance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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