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Greek-English lexicon are not well served in this matter: 'flute' appears erroneously in at least seventy articles. |
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But the malady extends to other instruments too. Even so eminent a musicologist as Dr Egon Wellesz, in his History' of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, besides calling auloi flutes, renders kitharai as 'zithers'. In the New English Bible, supposedly an effort of the most authoritative and up-to-date scholarship, not only are auloi constantly 'flutes' but in the Book of Revelation kitharai are 'harps' and kitharoidoi 'harpers'. The Jerusalem Bible commits the same errors, only more consistently.3 Meanwhile pektis, which in the classical period does mean a harp, is variously rendered by different scholars as a 'lyre' or a 'lute'.4 |
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It must be allowed that those wishing to inform themselves about Greek music have not found things made particularly easy for them. Accounts of the subject in English have been few and far between. They have tended to be of the highest scholarly accomplishment, but daunting to the uninitiated inquirer, who has soon found himself floundering among disjunct enharmonic tetrachords and Mixolydian/Hypoaeolian/Hyperphrygian transposition-keys, and has halted before a long table of notes with prodigious names like paranete diezeugmenon and trite hyperbolaion. Little wonder if he has cried out, like Thomas Morley's Philomathes, 'heere is a Table in deede contayning more than ever I meane to beate my brayns about'.5 |
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Well, he will eventually come upon such horrors in this book too; they are unfortunately necessary. But I scheme to lead him to them so gently and persuasively that by the time they rear up before him they will not seem so formidable after all. I am particularly well qualified to attempt this, being wholly without musical training. I have to take these things slowly to make them clear to myself. |
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I try to explain everything from the ground up, desiring the book to be accessible to anyone who knows roughly what an octave is. To the reader whose musical theory is at or near this minimum level I say with Epicurus, 'I congratulate you on coming to philosophy untainted by any education.' As for those who have left this state of innocence behind, I trust they will bear patiently with explanations |
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3 Likewise H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (London, 1977), 35. |
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4 Webster, 93, and others; J. E. Powell, Lexicon to Herodotus (Cambridge, 1938), 305. |
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5 T. Morley, A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (London, 1597), 34. |
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