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From the earliest times, we may suppose, practitioners and teachers of instrumental playing possessed a certain amount of technical terminology and lore connected with their instrument: a system of nomenclature for strings, notes, and tunings, formulae for changing from one lyre-tuning to another, traditions and legends concerning past players, their inventions and innovations. But from the late sixth century BC, and possibly earlier, we can see the beginnings of more developed forms of theoretical inquiry into the foundations of music. |
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At Athens in the time of the sophists there were a number of self-appointed experts on music theory giving lectures and demonstrations. They were called harmonikoi, a term which for Aristotle, at least, covered both those who calculated interval ratios mathematically and those who judged them by ear.1 Stratonicus, a virtuoso citharist and a renowned wit, is named as the first to teach ta harmonika and to construct a 'diagram'.2 Others used instruments for demonstration purposes without being able to play them skil-fully.3 Theophrastus, in his thumbnail sketch of the obsequious man, represents him as owning a little sports-court that he lends out to philosophers, sophists, arms-instructors, and harmonikoi for their lectures.4 After the fourth century we hear little of these oral expositors, but written treatises continued to multiply. In the end, Antiquity was destined to leave us far more musical theory than music. |
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That is why the theory bulks so large in most expositions of the |
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1An. Post. 79al, cf. 87d34, Top. 107d15, Ph. 194d8, Metaph. 997b21, 1077d5, 1078d14. But Theophrastus fr. 89 contrasts those who give a mathematical account of intervals with 'the harmonikoi and those who judge by sense-perception'. Cf. Pl. Resp. 531 ab, Phdr. 268de, Chrm. 170c. |
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2 Phaenias fr. 32 Wehrli. The diagram will have illustrated a combination of modal scales in one system. Aristoxenus, Harm. 1. 2, 7, 28, refers critically to his predecessors' use of diagrams. |
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3 Alcidamas(?) in PHib. 13; Arist. fr. 52. |
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4 Theophr. Char. 5. 10. |
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