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where;12 and the emergence of the chromatic genus in the fifth century points to an alternative form of pentatonic, with minor thirds and no semitones (until the lesser interval was divided).13 The latter, anhemitonic type of pentatonic is much more widespread in the world than the other. It is a common feature of European folk song; but it is also familiar in other areas. It is attested for the ancient Near East (besides diatonic scales) by the vital statistics of certain surviving Egyptian wind instruments, by the score of a Hurrian hymn from about 1400 BC found at Ugarit, and by some of the oldest Hebrew melodies, which are argued, from agreements between widely separated communities, to pre-date the Babylonian Exile.14 For the older Greek pentatonic system with major thirds, the best parallels are found in the Far East, in India, Mongolia, Tibet, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan. As in Greece, the major third usually occupies the upper part of the trichord, with a semitone step below it, and where the scale contains more than one such trichord, they may be either conjunct or separated by a disjunctive tone. Thus we get scales such as e f a b c' e' (west Java, Japan), e f a d' (Bali), or d e f a b d' (Japan), all of which would be quite at home in ancient Greece.15 On a monogenetic hypothesis one might suppose that Greece and Japan represent the extremities of a very ancient major-third-trichord belt extending across southern Asia, its continuity broken by a later preference, over most of the area concerned, for the more even division into tone + minor third. In support of such a theory, which was adumbrated by Sachs, it can be pointed out that in China and Java, as in Greece, there is evidence for the encroachment of the minor-third upon the major-third type, and that major-third scales are also to be found among the Moroccan Berbers.16 The theory would imply that the enharmonic trichord of Archaic Greek musicor perhaps we should say of south and east |
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12 Cf. p. 165 for the prevalence of diatonic music among central and west Greek tribes. |
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13Cf. p. 164. |
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14 See Sachs, op. cit. 73, and Musik des Altertums 32; A. Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in its Historical Development (New York, 1929); A. Sendrey, Music in Ancient Israel (London, 1969); Nettl, FTM 44; for the Hurrian hymn, my forthcoming study, 'The Babylonian Musical Notation', in Music and Letters' (1993/4). |
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15 Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, 125-30; L. Picken in E. Wellesz (ed.), Ancient and Oriental Music, 130, 139, 141, 144-6, 152, 159, 161, 165-7, 174-6, 178. |
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16 Sachs, op. cit. 126f.; Picken, op. cit. 130, 166f. I cannot discover the basis for Sachs's statement, repeated in several of his works and echoed by other writers, that Josephus speaks of the Egyptian harp as being 'enharmonic'. |
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