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
In the "_Epistola de Harmonica Institutione ad Rathbodum Episcopum
Trevinesem_" ("Letter to Rathbodum, Bishop of Treves"), there is
mention of the instruments of music during the seventh and eighth
centuries. They are the cithara and harp as the stringed instruments;
musetts, syrinx and organ among the wind instruments; cymbals and
drums, instruments of percussion. In the tenth century there was a
methodical treatise upon music in dialogue form, published by Odon,
abbot of Cluny, who died in this monastery November 18, 942. This
work, which was wrongfully attributed to Guido of Arezzo, contains a
number of analyses of intervals showing an understanding of the exact
dimensions of the various kinds of fourths, fifths, thirds and sixths.
According to his doctrine, the intervals of the fourths, fifths and
octaves are more natural for the voice than the others called thirds
and sixths, because the former are invariable, while the latter may be
larger or smaller by a half step. He makes a summary of ecclesiastical
chant, mentioning the modes as established by St. Gregory,
illustrating each of them by a selection from the "Plain Song." It is
a fact significant of the unsettled condition of musical theory and
the complete unconsciousness of musical amateurs that any essential
change in the art was being undergone, that as late as 1000 or 1020
Adelbold, Bishop of Utrecht, published a treatise upon music in which
the proportions of the tetrachords are calculated carefully according
to the Greek theories, and demonstrated upon the monochord.
III.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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