The Greeks had three genera of scale : the diatonic, the chro matic and the enharmonic. Of these the diatonic divides the tetrachord most evenly, as E, D, C, B :A, G, F, E. This gives us our diatonic scale in what Palestrina would call the Phrygian mode. The Greeks found that all its notes could be traversed (as a knight's move can traverse our chessboard) in a series of inter vals which they called concords. (They thought of them only as successions, not combinations of sound.) These were the 4th (in the ratio 4 :3) ; the 5th (3 :2) ; and the octave (2:1). (Our own "perfect concords" are in these ratios.) Scales with chro matic tetrachords (E, B:A, E) could also be traversed by the concordant intervals, but not so easily. The enharmonic tetrachords, which only the most accomplished sing ers could sing, were beyond the reach of perfect concords; and for us they would need a special notation, as E, C, B', B ; A, F, E', ; where B' and E' signify something like quarter-tones above the and E. Yet this difficult scale was said to be the oldest of all ; which seems not unlikely when we observe that it gathers three notes closely to the bottom of the tetrachord, leav ing a gap of a major 3rd from the top. Eliminate the quarter tones, and there remains a pentatonic scale E, C, B :A, F. E, which is more likely to be the earliest filling out of the downward 4th than the scales in which the auxiliary note is a whole tone away. And if this nucleus had the prestige of a mystic antiquity musicians would feel a pious pride in mastering the difficulty of filling, it up like the other genera.
If authorities on Greek music would abandon their habit of writing scales and reckoning intervals upwards, their results, whether correct or not, would become much more lucid. For, as Parry points out, it is only our harmonic system which makes us think of scales as normally rising; and when a musician ap plies the term "cadence" to chords that rise from dominant to tonic he contradicts the literal meaning of the word.
Until the most recent times classical scholars have ruthlessly closed the door upon all hope of further light from the compari son of Greek data with the phenomena of extant non-harmonic folk-song and Oriental scales. If such a comparison is to have any meaning we must assume that the now universal phenomena, of modes existed in ancient Greece. Modes, as far as non-har monic melody is concerned, are various cross-sections of a stand ard scale. Thus, Scottish music shows very clearly five pentatonic modes. Adding the 8ve to complete the scare, these are, I. C, A, G, F, D, C; 2. D, C, A, G, F, D; 3. F, D, C, A, G, F; 4. G, F, D, C, A, G; 5. A, G, F, D, C, A. In the article HARMONY the ecclesiastical modes of pure polyphony are given with their fondly imagined Greek names. Pre-harmonic music without modes is contrary not only to our Western prejudices but to the whole trend of anthropological research. In these circumstances classical scholars, under the guidance of D. B. Monro, crushed all hopes by deciding that the Greeks had no modes at all, but that either their or their Toy& (the terms, whatever they mean, are not synonymous) were mere transpositions of the three gen era into various pitches, just as our "keys" are transpositions of our pair of major and minor modes.
When Monro published his Modes of Ancient Greek Music in 1894, musicians had learnt too well the lesson that Greek music must not be expected to make sense. They would never dispute a point of classical scholarship; and it did not occur to them that Monro might be just so innocently familiar with modern music as not to realize that he might as well impute high-church tend encies to Alcibiades because of "the splendour of his liturgies" as impute to the ancient Greeks a system of keys related by mere transposition. But musicians only thought that even the most unprejudiced anthropological comparison of extant scales could prevail no more than Macfarren's Victorian assumptions could do in a dispute with Monro. Fortunately in 1916 Mr. G. H. Mountford, in a degree thesis, satisfied classical scholars that Monro was in error and that the Greek modes were modes in the universal and proper sense of the term.
Miss Kathleen Schlesinger has found, by experiments with a monochord, a means of producing modes on mathematical prin ciples. Certainly the Greeks did measure musical intervals mathe
matically on a string; certainly Miss Schlesinger's system is among the very first things that could have happened in that way; and its results produce many phenomena that ought to have occurred in ancient Greek music. There is, for instance, a remarkable passage in Plato's Republic (VII., 53r) where Socrates gibes at the pedan tries of the merely practical musicians who spend hours in arguing whether this and that note are too near to allow another note between them. And Miss Schlesinger's various scales comprise between them notes quite close enough to explain how the prac tical musician could get into difficulties about what was obvious to the philosopher. Miss Schlesinger has, moreover, tuned a pianoforte on the basis of her theory, and the result is acous tically very interesting. So much then, for a priori theory and practical experience. If Miss Schlesinger's results are not Greek they ought to have been.
The other line of approach is through the experience of setting the choruses of Greek tragedy to a modern music which confines itself to a strict representation of the metre and sets strophe and antistrophe to the same melody. The composer should not attempt Greek modes, on whatever theory, or he will achieve nothing better than an effect of singing "We won't go home till morning" on the supertonic of a minor key and with a beat missing. Instead of thus warping his imagination the composer should translate all that modern culture enjoys in Greek poetry into a music that he can enjoy; restricting himself mainly to one note to a syllable and, while making his instrumental accompaniment as beautiful as he likes, straying into no by-paths of musical tone-painting other than the most natural symbolisms. The Greek rhythmic forms prove musically fascinating, and there is full scope for fine melody within them. The strict correspondence of strophe and antistrophe causes difficulties which reveal much. Even a unisonous accompaniment, such as the Greeks had, can glide over a difference of punctuation or indeed a running on of the sense between strophe and antistrophe, as at the end of the enormous first chorus of Agamemnon; and the technique of such compro mises closely resembles that of Schubert and Brahms in strophic songs, and has the subtlety of Greek simplicity. Aristophanes, in the Frogs, laughs at the interlinear Oparro Oparro Oparr (or "plunketyplunk") of the Aeschylean lyre. The passage seems to indicate something more extensive than a merely connective tis sue; but exaggeration is not unknown in comedy.
More difficult and therefore still more instructive are the occa sional contrasts of sentiment between strophe and antistrophe. In another chorus in Agamemnon the pretty ways of a lion-cub are to be sung to the same music as the tale of disaster that befell the man who adopted it when, on growing up, it behaved as might be expected. The highest point of pathos in the first chorus, one of the supreme things in poetry, is the moment where the descrip tion of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia turns into a reminiscence of her singing in her father's halls and then runs on into the antistrophe, with the words "The rest I saw not, nor will I tell." After which the same music has to express the pious hope that the queen who now approaches shares the wishes of the chorus for the welfare of the land she holds in trust.
From Plato we learn that musicians degraded themselves by imitating the roaring of lions and the whistling of winds. But what was the Greek criterion for the singing voice? Certainly very different from ours; for Aristotle says that certain high pitched modes (but what is "high" in this context?) are suited to the voices of old men. An age-limit is the only criterion the heartless modern critic has for the voices of old men. Be this as it may, the safest inference from it is that every educated Greek was expected to sing well as an integral part of the art of speaking well. Perhaps our modern contrast between the sing ing and the speaking voice did not exist. Nowadays it is not uncommon to find a high soprano speaking normally around the A or G below the treble staff.