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Despite our poverty in actual music from Antiquity, it is possible to say a certain amount about the character of Greek melody. Ancient sources make occasional reference to melodic features of the music of certain composers or styles. The extant musical documents, few and fragmentary though they are, add appreciably to our understanding. Even from pieces of which only a dozen bars or notes survive, we may get some sense of whether the music has a tonal centre, whether it tends to dwell on particular notes or is constantly moving up and down, whether this movement is predominantly between adjacent degrees of the scale or across larger intervals, to what extent syllables of the song are divided between two or more notes. |
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Of course we must be cautious about generalizing from what is, after all, a very limited body of evidence. We must take account of the age and character of each text, and consider whether any of its melodic features may mark a particular style or epoch. There must have been changes over the centuries, and even if we cannot get very far in establishing what they were, the material does suggest some directions in which historical development can be traced. |
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General features of melody |
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Aristoxenus' discussion of the principles of melodic composition unfortunately does not survive, but later writers preserve notice of some of the basic distinctions that he made. As Aristides Quintilianus represents the matter,1 the musician begins by deciding whether he is going to place the starting-point of his scale (this probably means the tonic, not the highest or lowest note) in the upper, middle, or lower register of the voice. Next he fixes the structure of |
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1 Aristid. Quint. p. 29. 2-21, cf. 16. 18-17. 2, 81. 4-6, 130. 2, Ptol. Harm. 2. 12 p. 67. 6-8 (Barker, GMW ii. 341 n. 96, 418, 430f., 483, 531). |
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