680 



MUSIC. 



an Australian antiquary, some two thousand years 

 hence, asserting with the confidence to which his 

 researches may entitle him, that the instrumental 

 music of the ancient Europeans, and their less cul- 

 tivated descendants in America, was merely used 

 as an accompaniment to the voice ; that part of 

 their religions worship was the singing of psalms 

 accompanied by the organ ; that in their social 

 meetings the piano accompanied the song, and at 

 their theatres the whole object of the orchestra, 

 composed as it was of all the instruments then 

 known, was to sustain the voice of the singer, and 

 fill up the short pauses required by the meaning of 

 the words ; indeed, that the only use that can be 

 discovered of instrumental music independently of 

 the voice, was to regulate the step of a procession 

 or of a military corps. This sounds absurdly 

 enough, and we should say that our Australian des- 

 cendant might give us a little more credit for pro- 

 gress in the art, though he could not find any ac- 

 count of instrumental music in the poems of Cow- 

 per, or the essays of Johnson, the Dramas of 

 Racine, or the History of Hume. Why is it not 

 equally absurd to make such an assertion with re- 

 gard to the ancient Greeks ? They were a people 

 of at least as much ingenuity as any that have since 

 existed ; they had a decided taste for music, and, 

 if we may judge by the general accounts of its ef- 

 fects which have reached us, great skill in its exe- 

 cution; they had instruments of many kinds, both 

 wind and stringed, and yet they never could play 

 unless some one sang. It is enough to state such 

 a proposition ; reply is unnecessary. We know, 

 too, that music was constantly practised by the 

 people and profoundly examined by their philoso- 

 phers. The best treatise of ancient music, that 

 has come down to us, is by Euclid, in which he 

 examines the relation of harmonic sounds ; and if 

 we understood what he treats-of without explana- 

 tion, as familiar to all, we should probably arrive 

 at some more just ideas of ancient music. 



Another thing which is generally agreed on by 

 writers on this subject is, that the Greeks had but 

 two divisions of sound in regard to time, namely, 

 a long and a short one, and that the latter was just 

 half the length of the former. Brilliant music 

 this would make 1 The rudest inhabitant of Cen- 

 tral Africa has a greater variety than this, and a 

 better idea of musical rhythm. Just imagine 

 Sappho whining out her lyrics in alternate longs 

 and shorts, or Timotheus drawling before Alexan- 

 der, " softly sweet, in Lydian measures." The 

 softer the better, one would think, in such measure. 

 But it cannot be imagined. It is utterly incon- 

 ceivable, that the instincts of nature should be 

 tamed down to such miserable insipidity in a peo- 

 ple of lively imagination, like the Greeks. We 

 cannot but regard it as a piece of that pedantry, 

 which will believe nothing but what is on record, 

 and will insist on interpreting the record according 

 to its own limited conceptions. We venture to 

 take it for granted, without quoting authors to 

 prove it, that the Greeks, as well as the Hebrews, 

 as they had instruments, could play upon them 

 without singing, and that their long sound was sub- 

 divided into more than two equal parts. 



Another point upon which all must be agreed, as 

 there is no room for uncertainty about it. is, that 

 the ancients had nothing corresponding to the musi- 

 cal score or notation of modern times. They had 

 a name stnd a sign, derived from their alphabet, for 

 every note of the scale, and according to the most 



respectable conjectures (see Burney's History) theii 

 scale embraced three octaves, or twenty-two notes; 

 they had three genera, the diatonic, the chromatic, 

 and the enharmonic, and liftet n modes or keys, in 

 all of which the name of each sound was different, 

 so that, according to the computation of Burette, 

 the names of their notes amounted to sixteen hun- 

 dred and twenty. If this be true, the study must 

 have been laborious indeed, arid would require the 

 three years, which Plato allowed the young to de- 

 vote to it, to acquire its elements. There is much, 

 also, which is mysterious, and indeed unintelligible, 

 in the accounts that are given us of the genera and 

 tones, or keys, of Grecian music; and it would be 

 neither interesting nor profitable to attempt the 

 hopeless task of explaining what so many scholars 

 and musicians have failed to make clear. It is in- 

 deed manifest, that without a definite idea of the 

 sound of a single note, or an accurate knowledge 

 of a single interval of their scale, and with abso- 

 lutely nothing to guide us as to their divisions of 

 time, it can be but dreaming and trifling to think 

 of proving any thing precise or satisfactory with 

 regard to the musical composition of the Greeks. 

 If proof be required that we really do know no- 

 thing important respecting it, we have a demon- 

 stration in the attempt of Meibomius, one of the 

 most learned and thorough of all the commentators 

 on ancient authors who touch upon music, to imi- 

 tate the Grecian style of singing and playing. 

 Queen Christina, of Sweden, to whom he had dedi- 

 cated his elaborate work, desirous of obtaining a 

 more accurate idea of the ancient music than she 

 could do from the book, directed him to have in- 

 struments made of Grecian construction, to accom- 

 pany a song composed on Greek principles as he 

 understood them, to which another professor was 

 to sidd a Greek dance. When the hour of this 

 concert arrived, and the performance began, it was 

 accompanied by the irrepressible laughter of the 

 assembled court; and the enraged Meibomius, after 

 inflicting a box on the ear of the person whom he 

 suspected of instigating the plot, quitted Stock- 

 holm for ever.* Is it possible to imagine, for a 

 moment, that what excited mere laughter at Stock- 

 holm, could have been the delight of Athens two 

 thousand years before? Could a people, of so 

 strong a musical taste as the Greeks, have been so 

 singularly rude in the practice of the art? Or is it 

 more probable that Meibomius, and all who have 

 copied him in his account of ancient music, have 

 fallen into errors, and made assertions riot war- 

 ranted by the accuracy of their knowledge? 



One of these assertions, which seems to us of 

 doubtful character, is that the octave of the ancients 

 was divided into two tetrachords; and that this 

 was regarded as the principal division of the scale, 

 instead of octaves. The word tetrachord means 

 literally four strings, or an instrument of four 

 strings, such as were some of the earliest harps or 

 lyres used in Greece. The question is, How were 

 these strings tuned ? Did they consist, as would 

 be naturally supposed, of the third, fifth, and oc- 

 tave of the tonic, or were they, according to this 

 theory of the tetrachords, the first, fourth, fifth, 

 and eight, and the lyre thus divided into the two 

 halves of an octave? It must be recollected that 



