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his scale, that is, the intervallic relationships of the notes. In other words, he selects his genus and key. Then comes the delineation of the melody. This has three components: 'duction' (agoge), that is, moving through successive degrees of the scale; 'plaiting' (ploke), or jumping to non-adjacent notes; and 'deployment' (petteia), choosing which notes to use and with what frequency, and where to begin and end.2 'Duction' is itself divided into three types: 'direct', i.e. ascending; 'returning', i.e. descending; and 'circling', which means travelling to an adjacent note by ascending through a conjunct tetrachord, modulating to a disjunct one, and descending through that (or vice versa). Examples of this would be a  c' d' : c'  g, or d' c'  a:  c' d' e'. 'Plaiting' is represented in Ptolemy by the two terms anaploke and kataploke, meaning presumably ascending and descending ploke, and perhaps also by syrma 'trailing', which may possibly refer to some kind of smooth arpeggio or chain of intervals. |
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Not all of this is informative, but it does include some interesting points. First there is the choice of higher or lower pitch for the tonic, the focus of the melody. If it was low in the vocal register, presumably there were more notes above it than below it in the scale used for the melody, and if it was high, there were more notes below. This is a matter in which we observe some variety in the fragments. For instance, in the Berlin Paean (40) the scale extends for an octave up from the tonic, but there is only one note below it, whereas in some other pieces there seem to be only one or two notes above the tonic. |
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Secondly there is the distinction made between movement to adjacent and to non-adjacent noteswhat modern musicians call conjunct or disjunct motion. They are, of course, the only logical possibilities if the note is to change at all. But it is interesting that the distinction was thought significant. Or we may put it this way: it is interesting that disjunct motion was felt to be something meriting separate classification. The fact is that conjunct or stepwise motion is what predominates in Greek music. Out of some 2200 note-successions in the published texts, a little over a thousand, or 47 per cent, show a move to an adjacent degree of the scale, and this |
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2 Cleonides p. 207. 4 gives a conflicting definition of petteia as the multiple repetition of one note. This seems a logical complement to duction and plaiting, and it is something that occasionally occurs in the fragments; but it is less appropriate to the primary sense of petteia, which is playing a strategic board game. Cf. Winnington-Ingram, Mode, 56 n. 3. Cleonides adds a fourth term, tone, explained as the prolongation of a note. |
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