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Aristoxenus makes many disparaging references to his predecessors in the extant part of his Harmonics; unfortunately a more systematic review of their doctrines which he says he has made previously has not survived. The earliest theorist he mentions is Lasus of Hermione, an enterprising and innovative musician who was active in Athens in the last quarter of the sixth century and who is credited with writing the first book about music.15 It is possible that he actually coined the word 'music' (mousike, the craft connected with the Muses), which is first attested shortly afterwards in Pindar and Epicharmus.16 All that Aristoxenus tells us is that Lasus held notes to have breadth in the scale, that is, they occupied a certain finite portion of the line on which pitches were plotted, they were not mere points on it. This view was shared by 'some of the followers of Epigonus'. Epigonus was another progressive musician, active in Sicyon, perhaps a contemporary of Lasus, though the evidence for his date is very shaky.17 He appears not to have written anything, but to have been remembered as an artist and teacher by one or two disciples who did write. Possibly Lasus referred to him. |
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In Chapter 3 we had occasion to consider the forty-stringed instrument named after Epigonus. It was suggested that it was a board zither designed not for musical performances but for the dissection of the gamut into the smallest possible intervals, with a view to mapping out the various modal scales against this grid. A similar instrument seems to have been named after the fifth-century theorist Simos.18 The division of the octave into quarter-tones is an approach that Aristoxenus repeatedly criticizes, without naming its adherents. Some of them were evidently still at it in Plato's time. Plato describes students of harmonics who toil vainly to measure intervals by minimal units, which they try to determine by torturing strings as if on the rack, listening closely as if eavesdropping on their neighbours, and arguing about whether they have found the smallest interval to use as a unit or whether another yet smaller can be detected.19 |
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15 Aristox. Harm. 1. 3; Mart. Cap. 9. 936, Suda. |
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16 Pind. Ol. 1. 15, fr. 32, Epicharmus fr. 91. Craft-names in -ike proliferate in the 5th c.; mousike is, I think, the earliest attested. |
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17 See Jacoby on Philochorus, FGrH 328 F 23. |
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18 Above, p. 79. |
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19Resp. 531 ab; Aristox. Harm. 1. 7, 28, 2. 38, 53. Alcidamas(?) in PHib. 13 derides lecturers on harmony who use a psalterion (this is the earliest occurrence of the word) for demonstration purposes, though he says nothing of measurement by. micro-intervals. |
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