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The doctrine about notes having breadth is intelligible in this context. The people of whom Plato speaks were looking for notes so close together that it was impossible to fit another in between them. But this implies that the notes take up space on the scale. If they are mere points on a line (as Aristoxenus holds), there can never be two so close together that a third cannot be put between them, even if our ears can no longer distinguish them. On the latter view there can be no minimum interval in nature qualified to serve as a measuring unit. But if notes have a finite size, there is a real minimum. It is tempting to infer that Epigonus and Lasus favoured micro-measurement, whether or not they experimented with zithers.20 |
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Two other names bracketed together by Aristoxenus are those of Pythagoras of Zacynthus and Agenor of Mytilene. He praises them, very faintly, for having made attempts to articulate differences between different forms of tetrachord, pentachord, etc., though they did not catalogue them fully or grasp any general melodic law governing them.21 This Pythagoras, not to be confused with the famous pundit, perhaps belongs to the mid-fifth century. We also hear of him as the inventor and virtuoso of an instrument called a tripod, on which he could modulate freely between the Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian scales. It had the general form of the holy tripod at Delphi. The legs served as the frames for three differently tuned kitharas, the bowl made a big common soundbox, and the whole contraption was mounted on a revolving base so that Pythagoras could flip it round with his foot and bring one set of strings or another to his hands with no audible interruption.22 Once again we see the combination of practising musician and theoretician. He wants to combine modal scales in music, but he has not got as far as amalgamating them in one scale or eliciting them from a single enlarged kithara. Agenor of Mytilene lived some generations later. He was a musician of high repute about 350 BC, and teacher to Isocrates' grandsons.23 |
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Aristoxenus also allows some limited achievements to one Erato- |
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20 There is an interesting parallel in ancient Indian theory, which divided the octave, for measuring purposes only, into twenty-two sruti (practically equivalent to quarter-tones) and defined the degree intervals in different scales as two, three, or four of these. See NG ix. 91 ff. |
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21Harm. 2. 36. |
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22 Artemon of Cassandrea ap. Ath. 637c-f. Diog. Laert. 8. 46 gives a vague dating, 'not far removed in time' from the philosopher Pythagoras. |
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23 Isoc. Epistle 8. |
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