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eccentric characters: that they are borrowed from a Semitic alphabet; that they come from an early Greek local script, perhaps that of Argos; and that they are late and artificial symbols adapted from ordinary letters. |
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There is nothing to be said in favour of the first hypothesis.12 None of the symbols appears to be closer in form to a Semitic letter than to an Archaic Greek one. The third hypothesis, which presupposes the priority of the vocal notation,13 is hardly more plausible. Why should a straightforward alphabetic system, once established, be fragmented and tortured into something so much more obscure? |
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The second hypothesis, advocated by Westphal in 1867, still remains in principle the most persuasive, although Westphal's detailed identifications of letter-forms are open to criticism at several points. The instrumental symbols in their basic forms can on the whole be matched with letters in sixth- and fifth-century local Greek scripts, or easily derived from them. The hardest to account for is 13, but the difficulty is not so great as to constitute an insuperable obstacle to this approach. In most cases one can find analogues in many parts of Greecesometimes with several different letter values in different regions. |
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Of course, we want to identify one particular local script to which all the symbols can be related. The inventor of the system cannot be supposed to have taken some of them from one script and others from another.14 It is indeed the Argive script, as Westphal said, that offers the most satisfactory set of correspondences.15 |
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This points to the conclusion that the instrumental notation, or at any rate its original core, was invented by a musician from the Argolid, not much later than the mid-fifth century and perhaps somewhat earlier. One cannot help being struck by the coincidence that two of the earliest identifiable musical theorists came from this region or close to it: Lasus of Hermione and Epigonus of Sicyon. The latter, we recall (p. 225), left followers who carried on a tradition. However, Lasus and Epigonus, if our inferences were correct, followed the approach of dividing the octave into the |
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12 For the Semitic hypothesis see H. Husmann, Gött. Anz. 211 (1957). 57 f. and his Grundlagen der antiken und orientalischen Musikkultur (Berlin, 1961), 79f. |
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13 A. Bataille, Recherches de Papyrologie 1 (1961), 5-20; J. Chaiiley, ibid. 4 (1967),201-16. |
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14 As D. B. Monro thinks, The Modes of Ancient Greek Music, 74 f. |
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15 This requires more detailed argument than can be accommodated here. See ZPE 92 (1992), 38-41. |
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