The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and SumerSmith, Hermann
History
The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and Sumer
Smith, Hermann
Music -- To 500 -- History and criticism
The three sounds above this formed with the _a_ another tetrachord,
_conjunct_, as it was termed.
[Illustration: _The Added Trichord_
_d_
| tone
|
_c_ tone
|
_b_♭
) hemitone
*_a_
| tone
|
_g_
| tone
|
_f_
) hemitone
_e_
_The Original Tetrachord_]
Continuing to plot out the scale on a vertical plan would not be of any
advantage. The habit of the eye would perhaps require a diagonal line
of ascent; I think, however, that showing the growth of the scale on a
level line will best suit our general convenience.
This then let us call the Terpander scheme for the scale to which the
_seven-stringed lyre_ or Cithara was tuned. As we shall see, this
became the classical lyre of Apollo, throughout the glorious period of
Greek Art.
╭————————^———————╮╭————————^————————╮
_e_ ‿ _f_———_g_———_a_ ‿ _b_♭———_c_———_d_
*
The _a_ I have marked with a star. It was called the _mese_ or
_middle-note_, was considered the master-note of the lyre, and was
compared to the sun as being the centre of the musical system. The
original names of the strings of the four string lyre are lost, but it
is quite obvious that until the extra three strings were introduced
there could have been no _mese_ or middle string, so that the name
originated with this condition, with this perfecting of the system.
Before systems exists methods and rules have sway; and out of these
methods and rules systems are constituted. The great poet-musicians
renowned in the land, in teaching their successors in art according to
their own practical experiences, and teaching _viva voce_, no doubt
insisted upon the observance of certain methods, and laid down rules
which on their authority as chief masters, became the traditions of the
profession.
The great repute of Terpander would have caused him to be regarded
as one who spoke with authority, and I have sometimes thought that
discrepancies in the accounts given by different authors, who wrote
many centuries after the time of this musician, and from whom alone
we have any knowledge of the doings in such early period, might be
reconciled by the surmise that perhaps it was Terpander who first
showed how the two tetrachords should be disposed and the tuning of the
enlarged series of strings be regulated in the best way for the art
of music, so that instead of being left to the caprice of different
teachings, an uniform method should prevail. Some one in authority by
his recognised supreme skill, would have been necessary to reduce to
order the practices of the day as taught by the wandering minstrels in
the land of Greece, and in the numerous settlements in Asia Minor, and
it seems reasonable to suppose that Terpander may have been the first
to formulate definite laws for the structure of the tetrachord in Greek
music.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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