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So in practice the player could adjust each note to suit himself. This is what Plato means when he says that playing the auloi is a matter of aiming at each note by practised guesswork, and that it involves a great deal of imprecision and little that is fixed and reliable.77 Aristoxenus writes: |
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It is not because the aulos has bore-holes and cavities and so forth that it plays fourths or fifths or octaves in true accord or gives each of the other intervals its due size, but because of skilful operation, partly by the hands, partly by the other parts with which the player has the power to raise or lower pitch. For although all the holes etc. are provided, none the less auletes mostly miss the proper intonation, for all their taking the pipes away (from each other?) and setting them parallel, blowing harder or less hard, and modifying other factors . . . . Just as there is no attunement in strings unless one applies skill and tunes them, so there is none in bore-holes unless skilful operation brings them into tune. That no instrument tunes itself, but that its tuning must be ruled by the ear, clearly needs no proof, because it is obvious. . . . (The aulos) is particularly variable both in respect of its manufacture and its operation and its intrinsic nature.78 |
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Ethnomusicologists have found that in most pipes in most countries the spacing of finger-holes is not calculated so as to produce a rational series of intervals but is governed by the principle of equi-distance. Either all holes are equidistant, or there are two groups of equidistant holes, one for each hand. This does not give rise to equal musical intervals, which require increments of length that are in a geometrical, not an arithmetical progression. Some correction of notes may be made by adjusting the sizes or contours of holes, but for the rest it is taken for granted that the player will make the necessary corrections by such techniques as have been mentioned above.79 |
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Kathleen Schlesinger wrote a massive, a terrifying book, The Greek Aulos, based on the belief that Greek pipes too had equidistant finger-holes. She was untroubled by the fact that this is not true of the only surviving classical auloi that she studied, the two Elgin auloi in the British Museum. Nor is it true of auloi from Sparta, Ephesus, and Locri, which had been published before she wrote but to which she paid no attention; nor is it true of others which have |
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77Phlb. 56a. |
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78Harm. 2.42-3. Cf. also Ptok Harm. 1. 8p. 17.3ff. |
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79 Cf. E. M. von Hornbostel in Festschrift Wilhelm Schmidt (Vienna, 1928); Sachs, HMI 181f. |
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