Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/92

Rh 80 MUSIC [HISTORY. Ambro- How or when the musical system of the Greeks fell into sian disuse is still untraced ; certainly it prevailed and engaged music. ^ e a ^ention of philosophers for some centuries of the Christian era. The first notices of music in the Western Church refer to the manner but not to the matter of the performance. The name of St Ambrose (384 A.D.) is fami liarly associated with the music of his metropolitan church in Milan ; but all that is proved of his connexion with the art is that, advised by Flavian of Antioch, he adopted for the first time in the West the practice of dividing the verses of the Psalms between responsive choirs, an usage which has a natural connexion with the so-called &quot; paral lelism &quot; of Hebrew poetry, indicated in the English version of the Psalter by the colon that divides each verse. This practice has come to be falsely called antiphonal singing falsely, because, according to the etymology of the word and to Aristotle s definition, the Greeks used it for singing together, whereas the church uses it for singing in alterna tion. St Ambrose regulated the order of the prayers, the ritual, and other matters in the service besides the music ; his ordinances prevailed in Milan, and were distinguished by his name; so the term Ambrosian denotes the &quot;use of Milan &quot; in all things in which that differs from the practice of other churches. JSTo proof is given that the melodies so defined belong to the date of St Ambrose. Errors of Boetius (475 A.D.) was the most copious of the Koman Boetius. -writers on music, but his voluminous treatise De Institu- tione Musica proves that the Greek principles of the art had in his time become matter of antiquarianism ; nay, it proves further that he did not understand the technical terms he professed to translate. For instance, he mistook the word for the shortest string of the lyre (Nete), which naturally gave the acutest sound, to signify the gravest note ; and he mistook the word for the longest string (Hypate) to signify the acutest note. It is not necessary here to catalogue this author s many verbal errors ; * but it is important to mention that he ignored the advance made by Didymus and completed by Ptolemy in the tuning of the scale with the major and minor tones, and the modern semitone of if, counting upward, and returned to the Pythagorean division of two major tones, inducing a discordant 3d, and the leimma f{j. 2 The very eminence of Boetius makes it matter of regret that he ever wrote upon music. His Latin book being accessible when those of Greek authors were not, it was established as a text-book on the art in the English universities, and musical degrees were granted for knowledge of the principles it set forth ; musical progress was thus seriously retarded, and the 18th century was far advanced before search for sound theory dispelled reverence for his scholastic dogma. Grego- As St Ambrose ordained a ritual for Milan which bore rian hi s name, so also St Gregory the Great (590 A.D.) S1C&amp;lt; ordained one for Rome which was called Gregorian. The terms Ambrosian and Gregorian are now erroneously applied to a system of music that came first into use centuries after the dates of the two bishops, and they are applied even to melodies constructed upon that system. This sentence of St Isidore, the friend and survivor of Gregory, distinctly proves that no music of the time of the Roman pontiff was or could be preserved : &quot; Unless sounds are retained in the memory, they perish, because they cannot be written.&quot; Whatever the age of the oldest church melodies, belief cannot associate them with the days of St Gregory. 1 See Chappell, op. cit. 2 The ratios of the three may thus be stated with reference to modern notation, the last being the temperament now in use : C 1 T) T* 1 F 1 Pythagoras . . 576 648 729 768 Didymus ... 576 640 720 768 Ptolemy ... 576 648 740 768 The system of notation by letters of the Greek alphabet Nota- had fallen into disuse. A system by neumes (Trvei yua) or t * on - pneumeter, of later date than St Gregory, employed signs over or under the syllables to indicate the rising or falling of the voice but not to define its extent, and, in the manner of modern punctuation, to show where breath should be taken. This was followed by, though for a time practised coincidently with, one in which the Roman letters stood for notes. Afterwards, something like our staff was em ployed, of which the spaces only and not the lines were used, the syllables being placed in the higher or lower of them to denote to what extent the melody should rise or fall. Of earlier date than anything that has been found of like advance in other countries is a service-book which belonged to Winchester cathedral, and contains music written on the lines as well as in the spaces of a staff of four lines ; and this comprises a prayer for Ethelred II., who died in 1016. It has been stated and constantly repeated that staff notation was invented by Guido, a monk of Arezzo, who was alive in 1067, and whose book, Micrologiis, refers only to writing in spaces, and who throughout his works professes no more than to describe established principles, and these far less advanced than what then prevailed in England. To him is falsely ascribed the first use of a red line for the note F, and a saffron for the note C, and to him, as unduly, the appropriation of the initial syllables nonsense without the completion of the words of six lines of a hymn to St John the Baptist as names of the notes Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La. Hucbald (930 A.D.) invented a system, not of notation, Scales, but of scales, wherein the semitone was always between the 2d and 3d of a tetrachord, as G, A, bB, C, so the B and $F of the second octave were in false relation to the bB and flF of the first two tetrachords. To this scale of four notes, G, A, bB, C, were subsequently added a note below and a note above, which made the hexachord with the semitone between the 3d and 4th both up and down, as F, G, A, bB, C, D. It was at a much later date that the 7th, our leading note, was admitted into a key, and for this the first two letters of the last line of the above-named hymn, &quot;Sanctus Johannes,&quot; would have been used, save for the notion that as the note Mi was at a semitone below Fa, the same vowel should be heard at a semitone below the upper Ut, and the syllable Si was substituted for Sa. Long afterwards the syllable Ut was replaced by Do in Italy, but it is still retained in France ; and in these two countries, with whatever others employ their nomenclature, the original Ut and the substituted Do stand for the sound defined by the letter C in English and German termin ology. The literal musical alphabet thus accords with the , . AB C DEFG T La, Si, UtorDo, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol. Germany, however, a remnant of Greek use prevails in having the note above A at the interval of a semitone, namely bB, as was the classical Paramese above Mese, and the Teutons employ the 8th letter H to denote the sound we call t|B, and the Italians and French Si. The gamut, Gamut, which, whenever instituted, did not pass out of use until the present century, regarded the hexachord and not the octachord, employed both letters and syllables, made the former invariable while changing the latter according to key relationship, and acknowledged only the three keys of G, C, and F ; it took its name from having the Greek letter gamma with Ut for its lowest keynote, though the Latin letters with the corresponding syllables were applied to all the other notes. A system of modes had already been established for Ecclesi- ecclesiastical music which differed essentially from the astical Greek modal system in having no notes inflected by sharps modes -