Greek Music

So few are the fragments of music which have come down to us from antiquity that we are thrown upon a study of the theoreticians. That the Hellenes held music in high repute is evidenced by the power ascribed to it in the legends concerning Orpheus, Amphion, Ation, etc., and the facts that its invention and practice was ascribed to the gods, and that it was an integral element of the highest art form known to them, the tragedy. The theoretical writers have been diligently studied, but many questions concerning the ancient practice seem unanswerable. We may a ume that vocal music was unisonal; that if a rudimentary harmony existed, it was relegated to the instruments; that, in contradistinction to the music of to-day, the scales were built downward, and were conceived as composed of two groups of four notes each, called tetrachords; that the complete system embraced two modern IMG:content-0403.jpg:[graphic] Chandler's Encyclopedia octaves, and was divided into modal sections (beginning on different intervals), which gave their names to the ECCLESIASTICAL MODES (q.v.) of the Mediæval theoreticians; that systems of symbols were used for noting vocal and instrumental music, but indicated only pitch, the time being dependent upon the meter of the text; that instruments of the lute kind (kithara, phoror minx, etc.,) and pipes (aulos) (aulos) were used with and without voices; and that a knowledge of music (understood in its wide sense as embracing poetry and the dance) was e ential to a polite education. Only two musical monuments of unquestioned authenticity have come down to us; a hymn, supposed to be of date ab. A.D. 100, found 1882 at Tralles, near Ephesus, carved on a small pillar of marble, and a Hymn to Apollo, carved on two marble slabs found in excavating the treasury of the A then i ans at Delphi, May, 1893. Some fragments of a tragic ode by Euripi des exist, but not extended enough to furnish information. Four transcriptions of Greek hymns have been accepted as genuine, though the manuscripts are not ancient. They are: the opening lines of Pindar's first Pythic ode, pub. 1652, ostensibly from a very old manuscript found in a monastery near Me ina, now lost; and three hymns, to Calliope, Apollo, and Nemesis, pub. by V. Gallilei, 1581.