NON-HARMONIC AND GREEK MUSIC Music before the rise of a harmonic system is of two kinds, the unwritten or extemporaneous, and the recorded or scientific. At the present day the music of races that have not acquired Western harmony often pleases us best when it seems most extem poraneous. Tradition can go far to fix the forms and even the details of a performance that may, without the aid of words or dance, last for hours. With words or dance, music becomes more capable of being fixed by writing; but the first musical problems are as far beyond conscious reasoning as the origins of language. Birds solved them before human beings; and folk-music can show real beauty when the systematic music of its day is arbitrary and uncouth. Moreover, folk-music, together with the present music of barbarous races and Oriental civilization, can give us mate rials such as anthropology uses in reconstructing the past from its vestiges in the present.
For us the music of ancient Greece is by far the most im portant branch of musical archaeology. Unfortunately the ap proach to this most difficult subject has been blocked by lack of co-ordination between scholarship and musicianship; and the ascertained truth is less instructive to the general reader than the history of opinions about it. These opinions begin to be inter esting when they are expressed by musicians whose music we can understand. The natural tendency of such musicians was to sup pose that Greek music was like their own ; and each advance in knowledge is marked by disillusion. The first difficulty presented by ancient Greek writers was sufficiently disconcerting. The Greek terms for "high" and "low" were found to be reversed. Our own meaning seems founded in nature; and science confirms it. Our "high" or "acute" notes demand tense vocal cords and cor respond to vibrations of "high" frequency. A great i6th century composer, Costanzo Porta, inferred a mystery here, and argued that the Greeks had mastered the art of a totally invertible polyphony, such as Bach afterwards displayed in two fugues in Die Kunst der Fuge. Porta accordingly wrote a 4-part motet
(Vobis datum est cognoscere mysterium) which could be sung upside down : and his contemporary Vincentino composed 4-part motets in each of the three Greek genera, diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic. (See Hawkins's History of Music, i. 112, seq.) They are as good as any other music written on a priori princi ples, and the enharmonic motet may be commended to some of our modern experimenters in quarter-tones. But they represent as much knowledge of Greek music as we possess of the inhabit ants of Mars.
The truth must be sought by other methods and by far the most promising is the study and comparison of the present scale of nations, whether barbarous or cultured, who have not come into contact with the classical harmony of the West.
A readable account of musical origins may be found in Parry's Evolution of the Art of Music. Following the researches of A. J. Hipkins and A. J. Ellis, Parry illustrates the fact that most of the primitive scales, notably the pentatonic scales prominent in Scot tish and Chinese music, are built around the interval of a down ward 4th (as from C to G) which was probably the first melodic interval to become fixed in the human mind as being simple enough but not too wide. A scale would begin to form by the accretion of other notes near the bottom of this interval. Now take another 4th with similar accretions below the former, either conjunctly (as G to D below the C—G) or disjunctly (as F—C). The resulting scale will either fill or include an octave, it does not matter which; for the filled octave of the conjunct tetra chord contains in another position the notes of the included octave of the disjunct tetrachords, as can be seen in the combined series C, A, G, E, D, C, A, G. And the octave was recognized from the outset as a limit after which a musical series repeats itself.