Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Something got done

> [Daniel Wolf, TD 437.3]
>
> I've never heard anything derisive about the Greek
> enharmonic genera.

> [Johnny Reinhard, TD 439.1]
>
> I will have to respectfully disagree with my esteemed
> colleague, Daniel Wolf. The "enharmonic genus" of ancient
> Greece did become an object of derision.
>
> <snip>
>
> Timotheous was banished from Sparta for adding extra strings
> to the kithara

> [Daniel Wolf, TD 439.2]
>
> The strings added by Timotheus more probably extended the
> range of the instrument than interpolated additional tones
> to the scale (which presumably had a maximum of seven pitch
> classes within any successive octave).

An interesting discussion of this in Levin 1994 (p 160-163,
in the Commentary on what I have found to be the extremely
intriguing Chapter 11 of Nicomachus's _Encheiridion Harmonikes_)
tends to support what Daniel Wolf says here.

But a contrary view is presented by none other than Boethius.

Boethius quoted the famous 'Spartan Decree' which censured
Timotheus, and this document does indeed provide evidence
that Timotheus tampered with the tuning of the kithara (or
lyre, depending on the translation), which indicates that
he 'interpolated additional tones to the scale', or at
least retuned them:

> [Bower 1989, Appendix 2, p 188]
>
> Whereas Timotheus, the Milesian, coming to our city,
> dishonours the ancient music, and, rejecting the melody
> of the 7-stringed lyre, corrupts the ears of our youth by
> introducing a variety of tones; and by the multiplicity of
> the strings, and the novelty of the melody, renders the
> music effeminate and complex instead of simple and uniform;
> composing his melody in the chromatic instead of the enharmonic
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> [emphasis Monzo] ... be it therefore resolved, that the Kings
> and Ephori shall censure Timotheus for these things, and
> moreover shall oblige him to retrench the superfluous number
> of his 11 strings, leaving 7 ...

(This is the translation in Burgess 1821, which Bower,
who presents a carefully reconstructed Greek text on p 4-5,
says 'accurately captures the content and background'.)

Boethius quotes this directly, in the Greek alphabet, rather
than translating it (perhaps because it is in Spartan/Doric
dialect), and in his Latin summary of it reiterates:

> [Bower 1989, p 5]
>
> Timotheus ... had changed the harmony, which he had found
> temperate, into the chromatic genus, which is overrefined.

Bower also supplies a footnote, correctly stating that the word
_harmonia_, while it referred strictly to either the ancient
scales or the idea of 'proper attunement' in general, could
also be referring here to the enharmonic genus, as seems
appropriate to me in this particular context.

This document is also translated in Strunk 1950 (p 81-82),
and Strunk provides a footnote where he says that it is:

> [Strunk 1950, p 82n]
>
> perhaps the oldest forged document known to musical history.
> Wilamowitz, who suggests some emendations in the text ...
> places it in the 2nd century BC and calls it 'a potpourri
> of every convceivable dialectal anomaly'.

Bower 1989, in his Appendix 2, discusses the problems with
the transmission of this text, but certainly does not agree
that it is a 'forgery'; the main difficulty, other than the
confusion of medieval Latin scribes over the Greek in general,
is its unusual dialect.

Aristoxenus discusses the disappearance of the 'old enharmonic'
- that is, the one with the true 81/64 Pythagorean ditone
(which he favored), as opposed to the 'modern' 5/4 version
described by Didymus - in a couple of places.

In the pseudo-Plutarch _de Musica_, quoting Aristoxenus
(see Macran 1902, p 247), he says that there are two reasons
for the gradual extinction of the enharmonic genus: the
difficulty of hearing 'quarter-tones', and the impossibility
of measuring them accurately by means of the method of 'Tuning
by Concords' (i.e., successive '4ths' and '5ths'), by which one
*could* derive not only the Pythagorean diatonic but also the
Pythagorean chromatic scales.

Of course, if this Method were carried out far enough, to a
very extending Pythagorean tuning, one would finally arrive
at something resembling 'quarter-tones', but one would find
intervals resembling 'third-tones' far sooner, and Aristoxenus
used these for one of his shades of the chromatic genus.

The bottom line is that Timotheus was censured not for using
quarter-tones (i.e., the enharmonic genus), but rather for
'twisting *that* out of shape' and making it chromatic, which
used semitones. The enharmonic was the preferred genus in
musically conservative Sparta.

(All this and much more will be in my upcoming paper on
Aristoxenus, which at this point is more like a book than
a paper.)

REFERENCES
----------

Burgess, Bishop T. 1821. _A Vindication of Bishop Cleaver's
Edition of the Decretum Lacedaemoniorum Contra Timotheum,
from the Strictures of R. P. Knight, Esq._.
London.

Macran, Henry S. 1902. _The Harmonics of Aristoxenus_.
Edited with translation, notes, introduction & index of words.
Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Strunk, Oliver. 1950. _Source Readings in Music History_.
W.W. Norton, New York.

Bower, Calvin M. 1989. Boethius's _Fundamentals of Music_.
English translation, with notes and introduction, of
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, _De institutione musica_.
Yale University Press, New Haven & London.

Levin, Flora R. 1994.
_The Manual of Harmonics, of Nicomachus the Pythagorean_.
Translation and commentary.
Phanes Press, Grand Rapids, MI.

-monz

Joseph L. Monzo Philadelphia monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
--------------------------------------------------

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In my last post, I wrote:

> Bower also supplies a footnote, correctly stating that the word
> _harmonia_, while it referred strictly to either the ancient
> scales or the idea of 'proper attunement' in general, could
> also be referring here to the enharmonic genus, as seems
> appropriate to me in this particular context.
>
> <snip>
>
> Aristoxenus discusses the disappearance of the 'old enharmonic'
> - that is, the one with the true 81/64 Pythagorean ditone
> (which he favored), as opposed to the 'modern' 5/4 version
> described by Didymus - in a couple of places.
>
> <snip>
>
> The bottom line is that Timotheus was censured not for using
> quarter-tones (i.e., the enharmonic genus), but rather for
> 'twisting *that* out of shape' and making it chromatic, which
> used semitones. The enharmonic was the preferred genus in
> musically conservative Sparta.

Aristoxenus specifically states that 'modern' musicians
(i.e., those of his day) tune the enharmonic _lichanos_
'close to the chromatic'. And in fact, his 'soft shade'
of the chromatic doesn't sound to my ears very different
from his enharmonic. To me it sounds like he should have
classified it as an enharmonic more than as a chromatic.
I suppose the reason he didn't is because, in his mind,
there was really just one proper enharmonic, that which
resembled the old _harmonia_ with the Pythagorean ditone
and the quarter-tones.

I was turning those three ideas over in my mind, and had
the thought that perhaps Timotheus was not actually using
an actual chromatic genus at all, but merely distorting the
enharmonic by making the 'ditone' a 5/4 rather than an 81/64,
as Didymus did, and as Aristoxenus criticized.

Hmmm....

-monz

Something got done

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