GREEK MUSIC. The existence of music as an art or science among the ancient Greeks has for hundreds of years been a subject of inquiry and discussion among the learned. With the restoration of the art, and sciences at the end of the middle ages, the veneration for al] that belonged to taat people was carried to such an extent, that because we had to thank them for much, many writers thought we must be obliged to them for all. Fortunately, we have handed down to us various dissertations and frag ments on music by old writers, which, although they do not unfold to us anything like a satisfactory view of tire ancient Greek music, yet suffice to show us that among the ancient Greeks the art of music was in a very imperfect and incomplete state, and that, in its elements and groundwork, it was entirely a slave to poetry, and can have been little else than a kind of intoned declamation. We hear from ancient writers of the magic influence of music; but we must not forget that they used the word music in a collective sense for the gift of the muses generally; and «hen they spoke of the elevating and moral effects of music, it is to be understood that they meant a general harmonious cultivation of tire arts and sciences. The system of music known to the ancient Greeks, and as practiced in their temples and theaters, differed essentially from our modern music, as their scale, or, succession of sounds, was not based on.the octave and
its repetition, but on a fourth and iti4Tpetition, Their consisted of five tetrachords, each containing four consecutive sounds; the last sound of one tetrachord being always the first of the next; while two of their tetrachords had more than one sound in com mon. Iu modern music, the ancient Greek scale would be as follows: B, C, D, E; E, F, G, A; A, B5, C, 1), etc. This they called the diatonic genus. They had also their chromatic genus, thus, B, C, E; E, F, G, A, etc. ; and their enharmonic genus, the tetrachords of which consisted of two quarter-tones (which cannot be expressed in modern music) and a major third. It is beyond a doubt that the ancient Greeks neither possessed a system of notation by which their music, such as it was, might have been preserved, nor bad they any idea of harmony in the modern sense of the word. Many believe it impossible that a people who have left us specimens of their poetry and sculpture, which, after 2,000 years, are still admired as master-works, could have been content with such an imperfect and clumsy system of music. Had it been otherwise, it is scarcely possible to imagine that the knowledge of it would not have been handed down to us. An ode by Pindar, and a hymn or two set in modern notation from an old Greek MS., is the whole wo possess of ancient Greek music, and those are said by many to be spurious.