In speaking of the music of antiquity we are seriously hampered by the fact that there is practically no actual music in existence which dates back farther than the eighth or tenth century of the present era. Even those well-known specimens of Greek music, as they are claimed to be, the hymns to Apollo, Nemesis, and Calliope, do not date farther back than the third or fourth century, and even these are by no means generally considered authentic. Therefore, so far as actual sounds go, all music of which we have any practical knowledge dates from about the twelfth century.
Theoretically, we have the most minute knowledge of the scientific aspect of music, dating from more than five hundred years before the Christian era. This knowledge, however, is worse than valueless, for it is misleading. For instance, it would be a very difficult thing for posterity to form any idea as to what our music was like if all the actual music in the world at the present time were destroyed, and only certain scientific works such as that of Helmholtz on acoustics and a few theoretical treatises on harmony, form, counterpoint and fugue were saved.
From Helmholtz's analysis of sounds one would get the idea that the so-called tempered scale of our pianos caused thirds and sixths to sound discordantly.
From the books on harmony one would gather that consecutive fifths and octaves and a number of other things were never indulged in by composers, and to cap the climax one would naturally accept the harmony exercises contained in the books as being the very acme of what we loved best in music. Thus we see that any investigation into the music of antiquity must be more or less conjectural.
Let us begin with the music of the Egyptians. The oldest existing musical instrument of which we have any knowledge is an Egyptian lyre to be found in the Berlin Royal Museum. It is about four thousand years old, dating from the period just before the expulsion of the Hyksos or “Shepherd” kings.
At that time (the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, 1500–2000 B.C.) Egypt was just recovering from her five hundred years of bondage, and music must already have reached a wonderful state of development. In wall paintings of the eighteenth dynasty we see flutes, double flutes, and harps of all sizes, from the small one carried in the hand, to the great harps, almost seven feet high, with twenty-one strings; the never-failing sistrum (a kind of rattle); kitharas, the ancestors of our modern guitars; lutes and lyres, the very first in the line of instruments culminating in the modern piano.
One hesitates to class the trumpets of the Egyptians in the same category, for they were war instruments, the tone of which was probably always forced, for Herodotus says that they sounded like the braying of a donkey. The fact that the cheeks of the trumpeter were reinforced with leather straps would further indicate that the instruments were used only for loud signalling.
According to the mural paintings and sculptures in the tombs of the Egyptians, all these instruments were played together, and accompanied the voice. It has long been maintained that harmony was unknown to the ancients because of the mathematical measurement of sounds. This might be plausible for strings, but pipes could be cut to any size. The positions of the hands of the executants on the harps and lyres, as well as the use of short and long pipes, make it appear probable that something of what we call harmony was known to the Egyptians.
We must also consider that their paintings and sculptures were eminently symbolic. When one carves an explanation in hard granite it is apt to be done in shorthand, as it were. Thus, a tree meant a forest, a prisoner meant a whole army; therefore, two sculptured harpists or flute players may stand for twenty or two hundred. Athenæus, who lived at the end of the second and beginning of the third century, A.D., speaks of orchestras of six hundred in Ptolemy Philadelphus's time (300 B.C.), and says that three hundred of the players were harpers, in which number he probably includes players on other stringed instruments, such as lutes and lyres. It is therefore to be inferred that the other three hundred played wind and percussion instruments. This is an additional reason for conjecturing that they used chords in their music; for six hundred players, not to count the singers, would hardly play entirely in unison or in octaves. The very nature of the harp is chordal, and the sculptures always depict the performer playing with both hands, the fingers being more or less outstretched. That the music must have been of a deep, sonorous character, we may gather from the great size of the harps and the thickness of their strings. As for the flutes, they also are pictured as being very long; therefore they must have been low in pitch. The reed pipes, judging from the pictures and sculptures, were no higher in pitch than our oboes, of which the highest note is D and E above the treble staff.
It is claimed that so far as the harps were concerned, the music must have been strictly diatonic in character. To quote Rowbotham, “the harp, which was the foundation of the Egyptian orchestra, is an essentially non-chromatic instrument, and could therefore only play a straight up and down diatonic scale.” Continuing he says, “It is plain therefore that the Egyptian harmony was purely diatonic; such a thing as modern modulation was unknown, and every piece from beginning to end was played in the same key.” That this position is utterly untenable is very evident, for there was nothing to prevent the Egyptians from tuning their harps in the same order of tones and half tones as is used for our modern pianos. That this is even probable may be assumed from the scale of a flute dating back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century B.C. (1700 or 1600 B.C.), which was found in the royal tombs at Thebes, and which is now in the Florence Museum.
The only thing about which we may be reasonably certain in regard to Egyptian music is that, like Egyptian architecture, it must have been very massive, on account of the preponderance in the orchestra of the low tones of the stringed instruments.
The sistrum was, properly speaking, not considered a musical instrument at all. It was used only in religious ceremonies, and may be considered as the ancestor of the bell that is rung at the elevation of the Host in Roman Catholic churches. Herodotus (born 485 B.C.) tells us much about Egyptian music, how the great festival at Bubastis in honour of the Egyptian Diana (Bast or Pascht), to whom the cat was sacred, was attended yearly by 700,000 people who came by water, the boats resounding with the clatter of castanets, the clapping of hands, and the soft tones of thousands of flutes. Again he tells us of music played during banquets, and speaks of a mournful song called Maneros. This, the oldest song of the Egyptians (dating back to the first dynasty), was symbolical of the passing away of life, and was sung in connection with that gruesome custom of bringing in, towards the end of a banquet, an effigy of a corpse to remind the guests that death is the birthright of all mankind, a custom which was adopted later by the Romans.
Herodotus also gives us a vague but very suggestive glimpse of what may have been the genesis of Greek tragedy, for he was permitted to see a kind of nocturnal Egyptian passion play, in which evidently the tragedy of Osiris was enacted with ghastly realism. Osiris, who represents the light, is hunted by Set or Typhon, the god of darkness, and finally torn to pieces by the followers of Set, and buried beneath the waters of the lake; Horus, the son of Osiris, avenges his death by subduing Set, and Osiris appears again as the ruler of the shadowland of death.
This strange tragedy took place at night, on the shore of the lake behind the great temple at Saïs. Osiris was dressed royally, in white, and after the horrible pursuit and his murder by Set and his sinister band, Horus, the rising sun, dispels the gloom, and a glorious new god of light appears. Set and his followers are driven back to the gloomy temple where, perhaps, there was another scene showing the shade of Osiris, enthroned and ruling the dead. We have no means of knowing the character of the music which accompanied this mystery play; but certainly the deep tones of the harps and the flutes, together with the chanting of men's voices, must have been appropriate. Add to these the almost silent rattle of the sistrum, which, for the Egyptians, possessed something of the supernatural, and we have an orchestral colouring which is suggestive, to say the least.
With this we will leave Egyptian music, simply calling attention to the works of Resellini, Lepsius, Wilkinson, and Petri, which contain copies of mural paintings and temple and tomb sculptures relating to music. For instance, pages 103, 106, and 111 of Lepsius's third book, “Die Denkmäler aus Ægypten und Æthiopen,” will be found very interesting, particularly page 106, which shows some of the rooms of the palace of Amenotep IV, of the eighteenth dynasty (about 1500 or 1600 B.C.), in which dancing and music is being taught. In the same work, second book, on pages 52 and 53, are pictures taken from a tomb near Gizeh, showing harp and flute players and singers. The position of the hands of the singers—they hold them behind their ears—is a manner of illustrating the act of hearing, and arises from the hieroglyphic double way of putting things; for instance, in writing hieroglyphics the word is often first spelled out, then comes another sign for the pronunciation, then sometimes even two other signs to emphasize its meaning.
The music of the Assyrians may be summed up very briefly. All that can be gathered from the bas-relief sculptures is that shrill tones and acute pitch must have characterized their music. As Rowbotham says, alluding to the Sardanapalus wall sculpture now in the British Museum in London, “What can one think of the musical delicacy of a nation the King of which, dining alone with his queen, chooses to be regaled with the sounds of a lyre and a big drum close at his elbow?” The instruments represented in these bas-reliefs, aside from the drum, are high-pitched: flutes, pipes, trumpets, cymbals, and the smaller stringed instruments. These were all portable, and some, such as drums and dulcimers, were strapped to the body, all of which points to the eminently warlike character of the people. Instead of clapping the hands to mark the time as did the Egyptians, they stamped their feet. The dulcimer was somewhat like a modern zither, and may be said to contain the germ of our piano; for it was in the form of a flat case, strapped to the body and held horizontally in front of the player. The strings were struck with a kind of plectrum, held in the right hand, and were touched with the left hand immediately afterwards to stop the vibration, just as the dampers in the pianoforte fall on the string the moment the key is released. There existed among the Chaldeans a science of music, which, of course, is a very different thing from practical music, but it was so imbued with astronomical symbolism that it seems hardly worth while to consider it here. The art of Babylonia and Assyria culminated in architecture and bas-relief sculpture, and it is chiefly valuable as being the germ from which Greek art was developed.
In considering Chinese music one has somewhat the same feeling as one would have in looking across a flat plain. There are no mountains in Chinese music, and there is nothing in its history to make us think that it was ever anything but a more or less puerile playing with sound; therefore there is no separating modern Chinese music from that of antiquity. To be sure, Confucius (about 500 B.C.) said that to be well governed a nation must possess good music. Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Plato, in Greece, said the same thing, and their maxims proved a very important factor in the music of ancient times, for the simple reason that an art controlled by government can have nothing very vital about it. Hebrew music was utterly annihilated by laws, and the poetic imagination thus pent up found its vent in poetry, the result being some of the most wonderful works the world has ever known. In Egypt, this current of inspiration from the very beginning was turned toward architecture. In Greece, music became a mere stage accessory or a subject for the dissecting table of mathematics; in China, we have the dead level of an obstinate adherence to tradition, thus proving Sir Thomas Browne's saying, “The mortallest enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution upon truth, hath been a peremptory adhesion unto tradition, and more especially the establishing of our own belief upon the dictates of antiquity.”
The Chinese theory is that there are eight different musical sounds in nature, namely:
- The sound of skin.
- The sound of stone.
- The sound of metal.
- The sound of clay.
- The sound of silk.
- The sound of wood.
- The sound of bamboo.
- The sound of gourd.
The sound of skin has a number of varieties, all different kinds of drums.
The sound of stone is held by the Chinese to be the most beautiful among sounds, one between that of metal and of wood. The principal instrument in this category is the king, and in mythology it is the chosen instrument of Kouei, the Chinese Orpheus. This instrument has a large framework on which are hung sixteen stones of different sizes, which are struck, like drums, with a kind of hammer. According to Amiot, only a certain kind of stone found near the banks of the river Tee will serve for the making of these instruments, and in the year 2200 B.C. the Emperor Yu assessed the different provinces so many stones each for the palace instruments, in place of tribute.
The sound of metal is embodied in the various kinds of bells, which are arranged in many different series, sometimes after the patterns of the king, while sometimes they are played separately.
The sound of clay, or baked earth, is given by a kind of round egg made of porcelain—for that is what it amounts to—pierced with five holes and a mouthpiece, upon blowing through which the sound is produced—an instrument somewhat suggestive of our ocarina.
The sound of silk is given by two instruments: one a kind of flat harp with seven strings, called che, the other with twenty-five strings, called kin, in size from seven to nine feet long. The ancient form of this instrument is said to have had fifty strings.
The sound of wood is a strange element in a Chinese orchestra, for it is produced in three different ways: first, by an instrument in the form of a square wooden box with a hole in one of its sides through which the hand, holding a small mallet, is inserted, the sound of wood being produced by hammering with the mallet on the inside walls of the box, just as the clapper strikes a bell. This box is placed at the northeast corner of the orchestra, and begins every piece. Second, by a set of strips of wood strung on a strap or cord, the sound of which is obtained by beating the palm of the hand with them. The third is the strangest of all, for the instrument consists of a life-size wooden tiger. It has a number of teeth or pegs along the ridge of its back, and it is “played” by stroking these pegs rapidly with a wooden staff, and then striking the tiger on the head. This is the prescribed end of every Chinese orchestral composition, and is supposed to be a symbol of man's supremacy over brute creation. The tiger has its place in the northwest corner of the orchestra.
The sound of bamboo is represented in the familiar form of Pan's pipes, and various forms of flutes which hardly need further description.
And finally the sound of the gourd. The gourd is a kind of squash, hollowed out, in which from thirteen to twenty-four pipes of bamboo or metal are inserted; each one of these pipes contains a metal reed, the vibration of which causes the sound. Below the reed are cut small holes in the pipes, and there is a pipe with a mouthpiece to keep the gourd, which is practically an air reservoir, full of air. The air rushing out through the bamboo pipes will naturally escape through the holes cut below the reeds, making no sound, but if the finger stops one or more of these holes, the air is forced up through the reeds, thus giving a musical sound, the pitch of which will be dependent on the length of the pipes and the force with which the air passes through the reed.
Other instruments of the Chinese are gongs of all sizes, trumpets, and several stringed instruments somewhat akin to our guitars and mandolins. Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese have ever seemed to consider the voice as partaking of the nature of music. This is strange, for the language of the Chinese depends on flexibility of the voice to make it even intelligible. As a matter of fact, singing, in our sense of the word, is unknown to them.
Having described the musical instruments in use in China we still have for consideration the music itself, and the conditions which led up to it.
Among the Chinese instruments mentioned in the preceding chapter, the preponderance of instruments of percussion, such as drums, gongs, bells, etc., has probably been noticed. In connection with the last named we meet with one of the two cases in Chinese art in which we see the same undercurrent of feeling, or rather superstition, as that found among western nations. We read in the writings of Mencius, the Chinese philosopher (350 B.C.), the following bit of gossip about the king Senen of Tse.
“The king,” said he, “was sitting aloft in the hall, when a man appeared, leading an ox past the lower part of it. The king saw him, and asked, ‘Where is the ox going?’
“The man replied, ‘We are going to consecrate a bell with its blood.’
“The king said, ‘Let it go. I cannot bear its frightened appearance as if it were an innocent person going to the place of death.’
“The man answered, ‘Shall we then omit the consecration of the bell?’
“The king said, ‘How can that be omitted? Change the ox for a sheep.’”
As stated before, this is one of the few cases in which Chinese superstition coincides with that of the West; for our own church bells were once consecrated in very much the same manner, a survival of that ancient universal custom of sacrifice. With the exception of this resemblance, which, however, has nothing to do with actual music, everything in Chinese art is exactly the opposite of our western ideas on the subject.
The Chinese orchestra is composed of about sixteen different types of percussion instruments and four kinds of wind and stringed instruments, whereas in our European orchestras the ratio is exactly reversed. Their orchestras are placed at the back of the stage, ours in front of it. The human voice is not even mentioned in their list of musical sounds (sound of metal, baked clay, wood, skin, bamboo, etc)., whereas we consider it the most nearly perfect instrument existing. This strange perversity once caused much discussion in days when we knew less of China than we do at present, as to whether the Chinese organs of hearing were not entirely different from those of western nations. We now know that this contradiction runs through all their habits of life. With them white is the colour indicative of mourning; the place of honour is on the left hand; the seat of intellect is in the stomach; to take off one's hat is considered an insolent gesture; the magnetic needle of the Chinese compass is reckoned as pointing south, instead of north; even up to the middle of the nineteenth century the chief weapon in war was the bow and arrow, although they were long before acquainted with gunpowder—and so on, ad infinitum.
We are aware that the drum is the most primitive instrument known to man. If all our knowledge of the Chinese were included in a simple list of their orchestral instruments, we should recognize at once that the possession of the gourd, mouth-organ, and lute indicates a nation which has reached a high state of civilization; on the other hand, the great preponderance of bells, gongs, drums, etc., points unmistakably to the fact that veneration of the laws and traditions of the past (a past of savage barbarism), and a blind acquiescence in them, must constitute the principal factor in that civilization. The writings of Chinese philosophers are full of wise sayings about music, but in practice the music itself becomes almost unbearable. For instance, in the Confucian Analects we read, “The Master (Confucius) 2 said: ‘How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony, severally distinct, and flowing without a break, and thus on to the conclusion.’” The definition is certainly remarkable when one considers that it was given about five hundred years before our era. In practice, however, the Chinese do not distinguish between musical combinations of sound and noise; therefore the above definition must be taken in a very different sense from that which ordinarily would be the case. By harmony, Confucius evidently means similarity of noises, and by “melody flowing without a break” he means absolute monotony of rhythm. We know this from the hymns to the ancestors which, with the hymns to the Deity, are the sacred songs of China, songs which have come down from time immemorial.
According to Amiot one of the great court functions is the singing of the “Hymn to the Ancestors,” which is conducted by the Emperor. Outside the hall where this ceremony takes place are stationed a number of bell and gong players who may not enter, but who, from time to time, according to fixed laws, join in the music played and sung inside. In the hall the orchestra is arranged in the order prescribed by law: the ou, or wooden tiger, which ends every piece, is placed at the northwest end of the orchestra, and the tschou, or wooden box-drum, which begins the music, at the northeast; in the middle are placed the singers who accompany the hymn by posturing as well as by chanting. At the back of the hall are pictures of the ancestors, or merely tablets inscribed with their names, before which is a kind of altar, bearing flowers and offerings. The first verse of the hymn consists of eight lines in praise of the godlike virtues of the ancestors, whose spirits are supposed to descend from Heaven and enter the hall during the singing of this verse by the chorus. Then the Emperor prostrates himself three times before the altar, touching his head to the earth each time. As he offers the libations and burns the perfumes on the altar, the chorus sings the second verse of eight lines, in which the spirits are thanked for answering the prayer and entreated to accept the offerings. The Emperor then prostrates himself nine times, after which he resumes his position before the altar, while the last verse of eight lines, eulogistic of the ancestors, is being chanted; during this the spirits are supposed to ascend again to Heaven. The hymn ends with the scraping of the tiger's back and striking it on the head.
We can imagine the partial gloom of this species of chapel, lighted by many burning, smoky joss-sticks, with its glint of many-coloured silks, and gold embroidery; the whining, nasal, half-spoken, monotonous drone of the singers with their writhing figures bespangled with gold and vivid colour; the incessant stream of shrill tones from the wind instruments; the wavering, light clatter of the musical stones broken by the steady crash of gongs and the deep booming of large drums; while from outside, the most monstrous bell-like noises vaguely penetrate the smoke-laden atmosphere. The ceremony must be barbarously impressive; the strange magnificence of it all, together with the belief in the actual presence of the spirits, which the vague white wreaths of joss-stick smoke help to suggest, seem to lend it dignity. From the point of view of what we call music, the hymn is childish enough; but we must keep in mind the definition of Confucius. According to the Chinese, music includes that phase of sound which we call mere noise, and the harmonizing of this noise is Chinese art. We must admit, therefore, that from this point of view their orchestra is well balanced, for what will rhyme better with noise than more noise? The gong is best answered by the drum, and the tomtom by the great bell.
China also has its folk song, which seems to be an irrepressible flower of the field in all countries. This also follows the precepts of the sages in using only the five-note or pentatonic scale found among so many other nationalities. It differs, however, from the official or religious music, inasmuch as that unrhythmic perfection of monotony, so loved by Confucius, Mencius, and their followers, is discarded in favour of a style more naturally in touch with human emotion. These folk songs have a strong similarity to Scotch and Irish songs, owing to the absence of the fourth and seventh degrees of the scale. If they were really sung to the accompaniment of chords, the resemblance would be very striking. The Chinese singing voice, however, is not sonorous, the quality commonly used being a kind of high, nasal whine, very far removed from what we call music. The accompaniment of the songs is of a character most discordant to European ears, consisting as it does mainly of constant drum or gong beats interspersed with the shrill notes of the kin, the principal Chinese stringed instrument. Ambros, the historian, quotes a number of these melodies, but falls into a strange mistake, for his version of a folk song called “Tsin-fa” is as follows:
[MIDI]
[Figure 01]
Now this is exactly as if a Chinaman, wishing to give his countrymen an idea of a Beethoven sonata, were to eliminate all the harmony and leave only the bare melody accompanied by indiscriminate beats on the gong and a steady banging on two or three drums of different sizes. This is certainly the manner in which the little melody just quoted would be accompanied, and not by European chords and rhythms.
If we could eliminate from our minds all thoughts of music and bring ourselves to listen only to the texture of sounds, we could better understand the Chinese ideal of musical art. For instance, if in listening to the deep, slow vibrations of a large gong we ignore completely all thought of pitch, fixing our attention only upon the roundness and fullness of the sound and the way it gradually diminishes in volume without losing any of its pulsating colour, we should then realize what the Chinese call music. Confucius said, “When the music master Che first entered on his office, the finish with the Kwan-Ts'eu (Pan's-pipes) was magnificent—how it filled the ears!” And that is just what Chinese music aims to do, it “fills the ears” and therefore is “magnificent.” 3
With their views as to what constitutes the beautiful in music it is not strange that the Chinese find our music detestable. It goes too fast for them. They ask, “Why play another entirely different kind of sound until one has already enjoyed to the full what has gone before?” As they told Père Amiot many years ago: “Our music penetrates through the ear to the heart, and from the heart to the soul; that your music cannot do.” Amiot had played on a harpsichord some pieces by Rameau (“Les Cyclopes,” “Les Charmes,” etc.) and much flute music, but they could make nothing of it.
According to their conception of music, sounds must follow one another slowly, in order to pass through the ears to the heart and thence to the soul; therefore they went back with renewed satisfaction to their long, monotonous chant accompanied by a pulsating fog of clangour.
Some years ago, at the time of that sudden desire of China, or more particularly of Li Hung Chang, to know more of occidental civilization, some Chinese students were sent by their government to Berlin to study music. After about a month's residence in Berlin these students wrote to the Chinese government asking to be recalled, as they said it would be folly to remain in a barbarous country where even the most elementary principles of music had not yet been grasped.
To go deeply into the more technical side of Chinese music would be a thankless task, for in the Chinese character the practical is entirely overshadowed by the speculative. All kinds of fanciful names are given to the different tones, and many strange ideas associated with them. Although our modern chromatic scale (all but the last half-tone) is familiar to them, they have never risen to a practical use of it even to this day. The Chinese scale is now, as it always has been, one of five notes to the octave, that is to say, our modern major scale with the fourth and seventh omitted.
From a technical point of view, the instruments of bamboo attain an importance above all other Chinese instruments. According to the legend, the Pan's-pipes of bamboo regulated the tuning of all other instruments, and as a matter of fact the pipe giving the note F, the universal tonic, is the origin of all measures also. For this pipe, which in China is called the “musical foot,” is at the same time a standard measure, holding exactly twelve hundred millet seeds, and long enough for one hundred millet seeds to stand end on end within it.
In concluding this consideration of the music of the Chinese, I would draw attention to the unceasing repetition which constitutes a prominent feature in all barbarous or semi-barbarous music. In the “Hymn of the Ancestors” this endless play on three or four notes is very marked.
[MIDI]
[Figure 02]
In other songs it is equally apparent.
[MIDI]
[Figure 03] etc.
[MIDI]
[Figure 04]
[MIDI]
[Figure 05] etc.
This characteristic is met with in the music of the American Indians, also in American street songs, in fact in all music of a primitive nature, just as our school children draw caricatures similar to those made by great chiefs and medicine men in the heart of Africa, and, similarly, the celebrated “graffiti” of the Roman soldiers were precisely of the same nature as the beginnings of Egyptian art. In art, the child is always a barbarian more or less, and all strong emotion acting on a naturally weak organism or a primitive nature brings the same result, namely, that of stubborn repetition of one idea. An example of this is Macbeth, who, in the very height of his passion, stops to juggle with the word “sleep,” and in spite of the efforts of his wife, who is by far the more civilized of the two, again and again recurs to it, even though he is in mortal danger. When Lady Macbeth at last breaks down, she also shows the same trait in regard to her bloodstained hands. It is not so far from Scotland to the Polar regions, and there we find that when Kane captured a young Eskimo and kept him on his ship, the only sign of life the prisoner gave was to sing over and over to himself the following:
[MIDI]
[Figure 06]
Coming back again to civilization, we find Tennyson's Elaine, in her grief, repeating, incessantly the words, “Must I then die.”
The music of the Siamese, Burmese, Javanese, and Japanese has much in common with that of the Chinese, the difference between the first two and the last named being mainly in the absence of the king, or musical stones, or rather the substitution of sets of drums in place of it. For instance, the Burmese drum-organ, as it is called, consists of twenty-one drums of various sizes hung inside a great hoop. Their gong-organ consists of fifteen or more gongs of different sizes strung inside a hoop in the same manner. The player takes his place in the middle of the hoop and strikes the drums or gongs with a kind of stick. These instruments are largely used in processions, being carried by two men, just as a sedan chair is borne; the player, in order to strike all the gongs and bells, must often walk backwards, or strike them behind his back.
In Javanese and Burmese music these sets of gongs and drums are used incessantly, and form a kind of high-pitched, sustained tone beneath which the music is played or sung.
In Siamese music the wind instruments have a prominent place. After having heard the Siamese Royal Orchestra a number of times in London, I came to the conclusion that the players on the different instruments improvise their parts, the only rule being the general character of the melodies to be played, and the finishing together. The effect of the music was that of a contrapuntal nightmare, hideous to a degree which one who has not heard it cannot conceive. Berlioz, in his “Soirées de l'orchestre,” well described its effect when he said:
“After the first sensation of horror which one cannot repress, one feels impelled to laugh, and this hilarity can only be controlled by leaving the hall. So long as these impossible sounds continue, the fact of their being gravely produced, and in all sincerity admired by the players, makes the ‘concert’ appear inexpressibly ‘comic.’”
The Japanese had the same Buddhistic disregard for euphony, but they have adopted European ideas in music and are rapidly becoming occidentalized from a musical point of view. Their principal instruments are the koto and the samisen. The former is similar to the Chinese che, and is a kind of large zither with thirteen strings, each having a movable bridge by means of which the pitch of the string may be raised or lowered. The samisen is a kind of small banjo, and probably originated in the Chinese kin.
From Buddhism to sun worship, from China to Peru and Mexico, is a marked change, but we find strange resemblances in the music of these peoples, seeming almost to corroborate the theory that the southern American races may be traced back to the extreme Orient. We remember that in the Chinese sacred chants—“official” music as one may call it—all the notes were of exactly the same length. Now Garcilaso de la Vega (1550), in his “Commentarios Reales,” tells us that unequal time was unknown in Peru, that all the notes in a song were of exactly the same length. He further tells us that in his time the voice was but seldom heard in singing, and that all the songs were played on the flute, the words being so well known that the melody of the flute immediately suggested them. The Peruvians were essentially a pipe race, while, on the other hand, the instruments of the Mexicans were of the other extreme, all kinds of drums, copper gongs, rattles, musical stones, cymbals, bells, etc., thus completing the resemblance to Chinese art. In Prescott's “Conquest of Peru” we may read of the beautiful festival of Raymi, or adoration of the sun, held at the period of the summer solstice. It describes how the Inca and his court, followed by the whole population of the city, assembled at early dawn in the great square of Cuzco, and how, at the appearance of the first rays of the sun, a great shout would go up, and thousands of wind instruments would break forth into a majestic song of adoration. That the Peruvians were a gentler nation than the Mexicans can be seen from their principal instrument, the pipe.
While it has been strenuously denied that on such occasions human sacrifices were offered in Peru, the Mexicans, that race whose principal instruments were drums and brass trumpets, not only held such sacrifices, but, strange to say, held them in honour of a kind of god of music, Tezcatlipoca. This festival was the most important in Mexico, and took place at the temple or “teocalli,” a gigantic, pyramid-like mass of stone, rising in terraces to a height of eighty-six feet above the city, and culminating in a small summit platform upon which the long procession of priests and victims could be seen from all parts of the city. Once a year the sacrifice was given additional importance, for then the most beautiful youth in Mexico was chosen to represent the god himself. For a year before the sacrifice he was dressed as Tezcatlipoca, in royal robes and white linen, with a helmet-like crown of sea shells with white cocks' plumes, and with an anklet hung with twenty gold bells as a symbol of his power, and he was married to the most beautiful maiden in Mexico. The priests taught him to play the flute, and whenever the people heard the sound of it they fell down and worshipped him.
The account may be found in Bancroft's great work on the “Native Races of the Pacific,” also Sahagun's “Nueva España and Bernal Diaz,” but perhaps the most dramatic description is that by Rowbotham:
And when the morning of the day of sacrifice arrived, he was taken by water to the Pyramid Temple where he was to be sacrificed, and crowds lined the banks of the river to see him in the barge, sitting in the midst of his beautiful companions. When the barge touched the shore, he was taken away from those companions of his forever, and was delivered over to a band of priests, exchanging the company of beautiful women for men clothed in black mantles, with long hair matted with blood—their ears also were mangled. These conducted him to the steps of the pyramid, and he was driven up amidst a crowd of priests, with drums beating and trumpets blowing. As he went up he broke an earthen flute on every step to show that his love, and his delights were over. And when he reached the top, he was sacrificed on an altar of jasper, and the signal that the sacrifice was completed was given to the multitudes below by the rolling of the great sacrificial drum. 4
2 Kong. His disciples called him Fu Tsee, or “the master”; Jesuit missionaries Latinized this to Confucius.
3 The Chinese theatre has been called an unconscious parody of our old-fashioned Italian opera, and there are certainly many resemblances. In a Chinese play, when the situation becomes tragic, or when one of the characters is seized with some strong emotion, it finds vent in a kind of aria. The dialogue is generally given in the most monotonous manner possible—using only high throat and head tones, occasionally lowering or raising the voice on a word, to express emotion. This monotonous, and to European ears, strangely nonchalant, nasal recitative, is being continually interrupted by gong pounding and the shrill, high sound of discordant reed instruments. When one or more of the characters commits suicide (which as we know is an honoured custom in China) he sings—or rather whines—a long chant before he dies, just as his western operatic colleagues do, as, for instance, Edgar in “Lucia di Lammermoor” and even, to come nearer home, Siegfried in “Götterdämmerung.”
4 This drum was made of serpents' skins, and the sound of it was so loud that it could be heard eight miles away.
The first name of significance in Greek music is that of Homer. The hexameters of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” were quite probably chanted, but the four-stringed lyre which we associate with the ancient Greek singers was only used for a few preluding notes—possibly to pitch the voice of the bard—and not during the chant itself. For whatever melody this chant possessed, it depended entirely upon the raising and lowering of the voice according to the accent of the words and the dramatic feeling of the narrative. For its rhythm it depended upon that of the hexameter, which consists of a line of six dactyls and spondees, the line always ending with a spondee. Really the line should end with a dactyl (- ' ') and a spondee (- -). If a line ends with two spondees it is a spondaic hexameter.
From this it would seem that while the pitch of the chant would be very difficult to gauge, owing to the diversity of opinion as to how to measure in actual sounds the effect of emotions upon the human voice, at least the rhythm of the chants would be well defined, owing to the hexameter in which the latter were written. Here again, however, we are cast adrift by theory, for in practice nothing could be more misleading than such a deduction. For instance, the following lines from Longfellow's “Evangeline” are both in this metre, although the rhythm of one differs greatly from that of the other.
Wearing her Norman cap, and her kirtle of blue, and the earrings
and
Shielding the house from storms, on the north were the barns and the farm-yard.
Now if we think that these lines can be sung to the same musical rhythm we are very far from the truth, although both are hexameters, namely,
- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -
- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -
dactyls, ending with spondee.
Thus we see that metre in verse and rhythm in music are two different things, although of course they both had the same origin.
After all has been said, it is perhaps best to admit that, so far as Greek music is concerned, its better part certainly lay in poetry. In ancient times all poetry was sung or chanted; it was what I have called impassioned speech. The declamation of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” constituted what was really the “vocal” music of the poems. With the Greeks the word “music” (mousiké) included all the æsthetic culture that formed part of the education of youth; in the same general way a poet was called a singer, and even in Roman times we find Terence, in his “Phormio,” alluding to poets as musicians. That Æschylus and Sophocles were not musicians, as we understand the term, is very evident in spite of the controversies on the subject.
Impassioned speech, then, was all that existed of vocal music, and as such was in every way merely the audible expression of poetry. I have no doubt that this is the explanation of the statement that Æschylus and Sophocles wrote what has been termed the music to their tragedies. What they really did was to teach the chorus the proper declamation and stage action. It is well known that at the Dionysian Festival it was to the poet as “chorus master” that the prize was awarded, so entirely were the arts identified one with the other. That declamation may often reach the power of music, it is hardly necessary to say. Among modern poets, let any one, for instance, look at Tennyson's “Passing of Arthur” for an example of this kind of music; the mere sound of the words completes the picture. For instance, when Arthur is dying and gives his sword, Excalibur, to Sir Bedivere with the command to throw it into the mere, the latter twice fails to do so, and returns to Arthur telling him that all he saw was
“The water lapping on the crag
And the long ripple washing in the reeds.”
But when at last he throws it, the magic sword
“Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn.
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur.”
Again, when Sir Bedivere, carrying the dying king, stumbles up over the icy rocks to the shore, his armour clashing and clanking, the verse uses all the clangour of cr—ck, the slipping s's too, and the vowel a is used in all its changes; when the shore is finally reached, the verse suddenly turns into smoothness, the long o's giving the same feeling of breadth and calm that modern music would attempt if it treated the same subject.
Here are the lines:
Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare, black cliff clang'd round him as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of arméd heels.
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake
And the long glories of the winter moon.
When we think of the earlier Greek plays, we must imagine the music of the words themselves, the cadenced voices of the protagonist or solitary performer, and the chorus, the latter keeping up a rhythmic motion with the words. This, I am convinced, was the extent of Greek music, so far as that which was ascribed to the older poets is concerned.
Instrumental music was another thing, and although we possess no authentic examples of it, we know what its scales consisted of and what instruments were in use. It would be interesting to pass in review the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles, the odes of Sappho and Pindar, those of the latter having a novel periodicity of form which gives force to the suggestion that these choric dances were the forerunners of our modern instrumental forms.
Such matters, however, take us from our actual subject, and we will therefore turn to Pythagoras, at Crotona, in Italy (about 500 B.C.), whom we find already laying down the rules forming a mathematical and scientific basis for the Greek musical scale.
More than three centuries had passed since Homer had chanted his “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” and in the course of the succeeding fifty years some of the master spirits of the world were to appear. When we think of Pythagoras, Gautama, Buddha, Confucius, Æschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Pindar, Phidias, and Herodotus as contemporaries—and this list might be vastly extended—it seems as if some strange wave of ideality had poured over mankind. In Greece, however, Pythagoras's theory of metempsychosis (doctrine of the supposed transmigration of the soul from one body to another) was not strong enough to make permanent headway, and his scientific theories unhappily turned music from its natural course into the workshop of science, from which Aristoxenus in vain attempted to rescue it.
At that time Homer's hexameter had begun to experience many changes, and from the art of rhythm developed that of rhyme and form. The old lyre, from having four strings, was developed by Terpander, victor in the first musical contest at the feast of Apollo Carneius, into an instrument of seven strings, to which Pythagoras 5 added an eighth, Theophrastus a ninth, and so on until the number of eighteen was reached.
Flute and lyre playing had attained a high state of excellence, for we hear that Lasus, the teacher of the poet Pindar (himself the son of a Theban flute player), introduced into lyre playing the runs and light passages which, until that time, it had been thought possible to produce only on the flute.
The dance also had undergone a wonderful development rhythmically; for even in Homer's time we read in “The Odyssey” of the court of Alcinoüs at Phocæa, how two princes danced before Ulysses and played with a scarlet ball, one throwing it high in the air, the other always catching it with his feet off the ground; and then changing, they flung the ball from one to the other with such rapidity that it made the onlookers dizzy. During the play, Demidocus chanted a song, and accompanied the dance with his lyre, the players never losing a step. As Aristides (died 468 B.C.), speaking of Greek music many centuries later said: “Metre is not a thing which concerns the ear alone, for in the dance it is to be seen.” Even a statue was said to have silent rhythm, and pictures were spoken of as being musical or unmusical.
Already in Homer's time, the Cretans had six varieties of [5/4] time to which they danced:
[4 8 4 | 4 8 8 8 | 8 4 8 8 | 8 8 4 8 | 8 8 8 4 | 8 8 8 8 8] [- ' - | - ' ' ' | ' - ' ' | ' ' - ' | ' ' ' - | ' ' ' ' ']
The first was known as the Cretic foot, being in a way the model or type from which the others were made; but the others were called pæons. The “Hymn to Apollo” was called a pæon or pæan, for the singers danced in Cretic rhythms as they chanted it.
There were many other dances in Greece, each having its characteristic rhythm. For instance, the Molossian dance consisted of three long steps, - - - ([3/2]); that of the Laconians was the dactyl, - ' ' ([4/4]), which was sometimes reversed ' ' - ([4/4]). In the latter form it was also the chief dance of the Locrians, the step being called anapæst. From Ionia came the two long and two short steps, - - ' ', ([3/4: 4 4 8 8]), or ' ' - - ([3/4: 8 8 4 4]), which were called Ionic feet. The Doric steps consisted primarily of a trochee and a spondee, - ' - - or [7/8] time. These values, however, were arranged in three other different orders, namely, ' - - - | - - ' - | - - - ' | and were called the first, second, third, or fourth epitrite, according to the positions of the short step. The second epitrite was considered the most distinctly Doric.
The advent of the Dionysian 6 festivals in Greece threatened to destroy art, for those wild Bacchic dances, which are to be traced back to that frenzied worship of Bel and Astarte in Babylon, wild dances amenable only to the impulse of the moment, seemed to carry everything before them. Instead of that, however, the hymns to Bacchus, who was called in Phœnicia the flute god, from which the characteristics of his worship are indicated, were the germs from which tragedy and comedy developed, and the mad bacchanalian dances were tamed into dithyrambs. For the Corybantes, priests of the goddess Cybele, brought from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, the darker form of this worship; they mourned for the death of Bacchus, who was supposed to die in winter and to come to life again in the spring. When these mournful hymns were sung, a goat was sacrificed on the altar; thus the origin of the word “tragedy” or “goat song” (tragos, goat, and odos, singer). As the rite developed, the leader of the chorus would chant the praises of Dionysus, and sing of his adventures, to which the chorus would make response. In time it became the custom for the leader, or coryphæus, to be answered by one single member of the chorus, the latter being thus used merely for the chanting of commentaries on the narrative. The answerer was called “hypocrite,” afterward the term for actor.
This was the material from which Æschylus created the first tragedy, as we understand the term. Sophocles (495–406 B.C.) followed, increasing the number of actors, as did also Euripides (480–406 B.C.).
Comedy (komos, revel, and odos, singer) arose from the spring and summer worship of Bacchus, when everything was a jest and Nature smiled again.
The dithyramb (dithyrambos or Bacchic step, | - ' ' - | ) brought a new step to the dance and therefore a new element into poetry, for all dances were choric, that is to say they were sung as well as danced.
Arion was the first to attempt to bring the dithyramb into poetry, by teaching the dancers to use a slower movement and to observe greater regularity in their various steps. The Lydian flute, as may be supposed, was the instrument which accompanied the dithyramb, associated with all kinds of harsh, clashing instruments, such as cymbals, tambourines, castanets. These Arion tried to replace by the more dignified Grecian lyre; but it was long before this mad dance sobered down to regular rhythm and form. From Corinth, where Arion first laboured, we pass to Sicyon, where the taming of the dithyramb into an art form was accomplished by Praxilla, a poetess who added a new charm to the lilt of this Bacchic metre, namely, rhyme.
And this newly acquired poetic wealth was in keeping with the increasing luxury and magnificence of the cities, for we read in Athenæus and Diodorus that Agrigentum sent to the Olympic games three hundred chariots, drawn by white horses. The citizens wore garments of cloth of gold, and even their household ornaments were of gold and silver; in their houses they had wine cellars which contained three hundred vats, each holding a hundred hogsheads of wine. In Sybaris this luxury reached its height, for the Sybarites would not allow any trade which caused a disagreeable sound, such as that of the blacksmith, carpenter, or mason, to be carried on in their city limits. They dressed in garments of deep purple, tied their hair in gold threads, and the city was famed for its incessant banqueting and merrymaking. It was such luxury as this that Pindar found at the court of Hiero, at Syracuse, whither Æschylus had retired after his defeat by Sophocles at the Dionysian Festival at Athens.
The worship of Bacchus being at its height at that time, it may be imagined that wine formed the principal element of their feasts. And even as the dithyramb had been pressed into the service of poetry, so was drinking made rhythmic by music. For even the wine was mixed with water according to musical ratios; for instance, the pæonic or 3 to 2, ' ' ' - = [8 8 8 4]; the iambic or 2 to 1, - ' = [4 8]; dactylic or 2 to 2, - ' ' = [4. 8 8]. The master of the feast decided the ratio, and a flute girl played a prescribed melody while the toast to good fortune, which commenced every banquet, was being drunk. By the time the last note had sounded, the great cup should have gone round the table and been returned to the master. And then they had the game of the cottabos, which consisted of throwing the contents of a wine cup high in the air in such a manner that the wine would fall in a solid mass into a metal basin. The winner was the one who produced the clearest musical sound from the basin.
We see from all this that music was considered rather a beautiful plaything or a mere colour. By itself it was considered effeminate; therefore the early Greeks always had the flute player accompanied by a singer, and the voice was always used with the lyre to prevent the latter appealing directly to the senses. The dance was corrected in the same manner; for when we speak of Greek dances, we always mean choric dances. Perhaps the nearest approach to the effect of what we call music was made by Æschylus, in the last scene of his “Persians,” when Xerxes and the chorus end the play with one continued wail of sorrow. In this instance the words take second place, and the actual sound is depended upon for the dramatic effect.
The rise and fall of actual instrumental music in Greece may be placed between 500 and 400 B.C. After the close of the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.), when Sparta supplanted Athens as the leader of Greece, art declined rapidly, and at the time of Philip of Macedon (328 B.C.) may be said to have been practically extinct. Then, in place of the dead ashes of art, the cold fire of science arose; for we have such men as Euclid (300 B.C.) and his school applying mathematics to musical sounds, and a system of cold calculation to an art that had needed all the warmth of emotional enthusiasm to keep it alive. Thus music became a science. Had it not been for the little weeds of folk song which managed with difficulty to survive at the foot of this arid dust heap, and which were destined to be transformed and finally to bloom into such lovely flowers in our times, we might yet have been using the art to illustrate mathematical calculations.
The teaching of Pythagoras was the first step in this classification of sounds; and he went further than this, for he also classified the emotions affected by music. It was therefore a natural consequence that in his teaching he should forbid music of an emotional character as injurious. When he came to Crotona, it was to a city that vied with Agrigentum, Sybaris, and Tarentum in luxury; its chief magistrate wore purple garments, a golden crown upon his head, and white shoes on his feet. It was said of Pythagoras that he had studied twelve years with the Magi in the temples of Babylon; had lived among the Druids of Gaul and the Indian Brahmins; had gone among the priests of Egypt and witnessed their most secret temple rites. So free from care or passion was his face that he was thought by the people to be Apollo; he was of majestic presence, and the most beautiful man they had ever seen. So the people accepted him as a superior being, and his influence became supreme over science and art, as well as manners.
He gave the Greeks their first scientific analysis of sound. The legend runs that, passing a blacksmith's shop and hearing the different sounds of the hammering, he conceived the idea that sounds could be measured by some such means as weight is measured by scales, or distance by the foot rule. By weighing the different hammers, so the story goes, he obtained the knowledge of harmonics or overtones, namely, the fundamental, octave, fifth, third, etc. This legend, which is stated seriously in many histories of music, is absurd, for, as we know, the hammers would not have vibrated. The anvils would have given the sound, but in order to produce the octave, fifth, etc., they would have had to be of enormous proportions. On the other hand, the monochord, with which students in physics are familiar, was his invention; and the first mathematical demonstrations of the effect on musical pitch of length of cord and tension, as well as the length of pipes and force of breath, were his.
These mathematical divisions of the monochord, however, eventually did more to stifle music for a full thousand years than can easily be imagined. This division of the string made what we call harmony impossible; for by it the major third became a larger interval than our modern one, and the minor third smaller. Thus thirds did not sound well together, in fact were dissonances, the only intervals which did harmonize being the fourth, fifth, and octave. This system of mathematically dividing tones into equal parts held good up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when Zarlino, who died in 1590, invented the system in use at the present time, called the tempered scale, which, however, did not come into general use until one hundred years later.
Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, who lived more than a century after Pythagoras, rejected the monochord as a means for gauging musical sounds, believing that the ear, not mathematical calculation, should be the judge as to which interval sounds “perfect.” But he was unable to formulate a system that would bring the third (and naturally its inversion the sixth) among the harmonizing intervals or consonants. Didymus (about 30 B.C.) first discovered that two different-sized whole tones were necessary in order to make the third consonant; and Ptolemy (120 A.D.) improved on this system somewhat. But the new theory remained without any practical effect until nearly the seventeenth century, when the long respected theory of the perfection of mathematical calculation on the basis of natural phenomena was overthrown in favour of actual effect. If Aristoxenus had had followers able to combat the crushing influence of Euclid and his school, music might have grown up with the other arts. As it is, music is still in its infancy, and has hardly left its experimental stage.
Thus Pythagoras brought order into the music as well as into the lives of people. But whereas it ennobled the people, it killed the music, the one vent in life through which unbounded utterance is possible; its essence is so interwoven with spirituality that to tear it away and fetter it with human mathematics is to lower it to the level of mere utilitarianism. And so it was with Greek music, which was held subordinate to metre, to poetry, to acting, and finally became a term of contempt. Pythagoras wished to banish the flute, as Plato also did later, and the name of flute player was used as a reproach. I fancy this was because the flute, on account of its construction, could ignore the mathematical divisions prescribed for the stringed instruments, and therefore could indulge in purely emotional music. Besides, the flute was the chosen instrument of the orgiastic Bacchic cult, and its associations were those of unbridled license. To be sure, the voice was held by no mathematical restrictions as to pitch; but its music was held in check by the words, and its metre by dancing feet.
Having measured the musical intervals, there still remained the task of classifying the different manners of singing which existed in Greece, and using all their different notes to form a general system. For just as in different parts of Greece there existed different dances, the steps of which were known as Lydian, Ionian, Locrian, and Dorian feet, and so on, so the melodies to which they were danced were known as being in the Lydian, Ionian, Locrian, or Dorian scale or mode. In speaking of Hindu music, I explained that what we call a mode consists of a scale, and that one mode differs from another only in the position of the semitones in this scale. Now in ancient Greece there were in use over fifteen different modes, each one common to the part of the country in which it originated. At the time of Pythagoras there were seven in general use: the Dorian, Lydian, Æolian or Locrian, Hypo- (or low) Lydian, Phrygian, Hypo- (or low) Phrygian, and Mixolydian or mixed Lydian. The invention of the latter is attributed to Sappho by Plutarch, quoting Aristoxenus.
These modes were all invested with individual characters by the Greeks, just as in the present day we say our major mode is happy, the minor sad. The Dorian mode was considered the greatest, and, according to Plato, the only one worthy of men. It was supposed to have a dignified, martial character. The Lydian, on the other hand, was all softness, and love songs were written in it. The Phrygian was of a violent, ecstatic nature, and was considered as being especially appropriate for dithyrambs, the metre for the wild bacchanalian dances. For instance, Aristotle tells how Philoxenus attempted to set dithyrambic verse to the Dorian mode, and, failing, had to return to the Phrygian. The Mixolydian, which was Sappho's mode, was the mode for sentiment and passion. The Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian were the oldest modes.
Each mode or scale was composed of two sets of four notes, called tetrachords, probably derived from the ancient form of the lyre, which in Homer's time is known to have had four strings.
Leaving the matter of actual pitch out of the question (for these modes might be pitched high or low, just as our major or minor scale may be pitched in different keys), these three modes were constructed as follows:
Greek: Dorian (E F) G A (B C) D E, that is, semitone, tone, tone. Asiatic: Phrygian D (E F) G A (B C) D, or F# (G# A) B C# (D# E) F#, that is, tone, semitone, tone. Lydian C D (E F) G A (B C), that is, tone, tone, semitone.
Thus we see that a tetrachord commencing with a half-tone and followed by two whole tones was called a Dorian tetrachord; one commencing with a tone, followed by a half-tone, and again a tone, constituted a Phrygian tetrachord. The other modes were as follows: In the Æolian or Locrian the semitones occur between the second and third notes, and the fifth and sixth:
Theraclides Ponticus identifies the Hypodorian with the Æolian, but says that the name “hypo-” merely denoted a likeness to Doric, not to pitch. Aristoxenus denies the identity, and says that the Hypodorian was a semitone below the Dorian or Hypolydian. In the Hypophrygian, the semitones occur between the third and fourth, and sixth and seventh degrees:
[F: c+ d+ (e+ f+) g+ (a+ b) c+']
In the Hypolydian, the semitones occur between the fourth and fifth, and seventh and eighth:
[F: e- f g (a b-) c' (d' e-')]
The Dorian (E), Phrygian (commencing on F♯ with the fourth sharped), and the Lydian (A♭ major scale) modes we have already explained. In the Mixolydian, the semitones occur between the first and second, and fourth and fifth degrees:
[G: (a b-) c' (d' e-') f' g' a']
According to the best evidence (in the works of Ptolemy, “Harmonics,” second book, and Aristides), these were approximately the actual pitch of the modes as compared one to another.
And now the difficulty was to weld all these modes together into one scale, so that all should be represented and yet not be complicated by what we should call accidentals. This was accomplished in the following manner, by simple mathematical means:
We remember that the Dorian, which was the most greatly favoured mode in Greece, was divided into two tetrachords of exactly the same proportions, namely, semitone, tone, tone. By taking the lowest note of the Mixolydian, B, and forming a Dorian tetrachord on it, B C D E were acquired. Adding to this another Dorian tetrachord, E F G A (commencing on the last note of the first), and repeating the same series of tetrachords an octave higher, we have in all four Dorian tetrachords, two of which overlap the others. The two middle tetrachords, constituting the original Dorian mode, were called disjunct, the two outer ones which overlap the middle ones were called conjunct or synemmenon tetrachords.