Page:Vitruvius the Ten Books on Architecture.djvu/174

140 I can from the writings of Aristoxenus, append his scheme, and define the boundaries of the notes, so that with somewhat care­ful attention anybody may be able to understand it pretty easily.

2. The voice, in its changes of position when shifting pitch, becomes sometimes high, sometimes low, and its movements are of two kinds, in one of which its progress is continuous, in the other by intervals. The continuous voice does not become sta­tionary at the "boundaries" or at any definite place, and so the extremities of its progress are not apparent, but the fact that there are differences of pitch is apparent, as in our ordinary speech in sol, lux, flos, vox; for in these cases we cannot tell at what pitch the voice begins, nor at what pitch it leaves off, but the fact that it becomes low from high and high from low is ap­parent to the ear. In its progress by intervals the opposite is the case. For here, when the pitch shifts, the voice, by change of position, stations itself on one pitch, then on another, and, as it frequently repeats this alternating process, it appears to the senses to become stationary, as happens in singing when we pro­duce a variation of the mode by changing the pitch of the voice. And so, since it moves by intervals, the points at which it begins and where it leaves off are obviously apparent in the boundaries of the notes, but the intermediate points escape notice and are obscure, owing to the intervals.

3. There are three classes of modes: first, that which the Greeks term the enharmonic; second, the chromatic; third, the dia­tonic. The enharmonic mode is an artistic conception, and there­fore execution in it has a specially severe dignity and distinction. The chromatic, with its delicate subtlety and with the "crowd­ing" of its notes, gives a sweeter kind of pleasure. In the dia­tonic, the distance between the intervals is easier to understand, because it is natural. These three classes differ in their arrange­ment of the tetrachord. In the enharmonic, the tetrachord con­sists of two tones and two "dieses." A diesis is a quarter tone; hence in a semitone there are included two dieses. In the chro­matic there are two semitones arranged in succession, and the