Notes

Tunings

• Music and dance is a cultural phenomenon since it’s created by people and not found in nature

  • The movement of the voice when speaking is continuous, because it doesn’t stop at any point in time

  • When it sings or creates music, you see movement of the voice stopping and jumping at particular tonal level

    • Grammarians study the first line while musicians study the bottom

      

  • In the diagram, when you go up you increase a semitone. When you move left ot right, it creates a time difference. Pitch Y axis and duration is on the X axis

    • Professor never uses staff notation and only uses this system

• Perfect fouth was called a tetrachord because it had 4 and 5 semitones

  • Scales were built off of tetrachords connected but had rules

    • The bottom and top always had the same bottom and low notes
    • The middle notes could be changed
    • The second and third degrees had different topos, or ranges

  • The ancient Greek tetrachord had three Genera or Genus

    • If your 4-string lyre is tuned with the correct ratios, you’re tuned in the diatonic Genus
    • If you tune a certain within the range, you get the chromatic Genus
    • You get the enharmonic genus
      • Again, if you change the range, you create a Thickett
      • Happens in enharmonic and chromatic

    

• The different shades affect the tuning of the tuning

  • Tense diatonic
  • Soft diatonic
  • Tonal chromatic
  • Heniolic chromatic
  • Soft Chromatic
    • Ancient Lyricists used different shades and toned to that shade to reflect a specific emotion

  

• Scales where created by tetrachord by

  • Combining two and creating a conjunction

  • Disjunction inserting a tone two join the tetrachords

  • You can join conjunction and disjunction to create much larger scales

    • The minor system had less notes than a major system

  • Perfect immutable system contains 5 tetrachords

    • Diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic

    

• A Genus is a color and a shade is a shade of a color

  • Tetrachord → Genus → Shade
  • Tetrachord → Genus → Shade → Conjunction +Disjunction → Scales → Immutable Scale System

• Modes come from the movement of the different immutable systems in semitones

  • Hypo and hyper systems

  

• They would put letters of the degree within the written system

• With melodies, the key, genus, and shades would change

<aside> 💡 Ancient had a lot of ways to tune, all of which was based on the Tetrachord. Different ways of tuning the middle two notes of a tetrachord would create the three Genus: Chromatic, Enharmonic, and Diatonic. All the Genus had different Shade which shifted the mood of the piece. The Conjunction and Disjunction of Tetrachords came together to create the immutable scale system. Modulations of the scale system is what creates the different modes.

</aside>

Melody

• Athenios 127 B.C and Limenios 128 B.C created inscribed pieces in stone that included lyrics and and a musical symbol above each note
  • The Alypian Notation is the specific notation that is used as it is called today. Parasemantike is what is was called by the ancients
  • An ancient score is a line if lyrics, a line of musical text, and a line of rhythmic signs
    • If there are no rhythms, it’s inherent to the speech and the the letters
  • Meter comes from the analysis of the duration and pitch of notes as it relates to the lyrics being sung
• Looking at his excel sheet, you have the lyrics, the pitch of the note is represented by the x
  • The lyrics are really just based on the genus, shade, and overall mode
• Mesomedes lived in 2nd century AD who was a famous composer for the Emperor of Roman
• Professor has created a complete notation which serves a better purpose for his purposes and allows better explanation than staff notation
  • It is really from the way the Greeks describe
• The themes of Ancient Greek lyrical poetry had a myriad
  • Sympotic
  • Hymns
  • Gods/Festivals
  • Tragedy + Drama
  • Dithram
    • Cult song to Dionysus
  • Weddings
  • Parthenias
  • Funerals
  • Odes to winners of Olympic Games - Epinisyums
• Every event in the Ancient Greeks lives were punctuated by music
• The right choice of notes gives the right ethos and character