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4 EARLY CHRISTIAN MUSIC
c. 430); but these hymns were not introduced into the liturgy, and
had no influence on later hymnology.
The earliest example of a Christian hymn which has come down to
us with music is a fragment of a song in praise of the Holy Trinity
dating from the late third century and written by a Greek-speaking
Christian in Egypt. 1 The strip of papyrus, which contains the close
of the hymn, is very much mutilated, but three of the five lines are
easily legible, and they enable us to draw some conclusions as to the
structure of the music. We give lines 3-5 in modern staff notation:
Ex.i
f-rrja - re - pa x*vi - ov
JL i
c - TTI - - voui/ - TCUV
, .
S[O>T] - -
fj pi fj.o-va> Trdv - ra)v ^ a - ya - 6u>
TTVtii - yu,a. "n"ci - acu 8u - fa-uctf
\xr\v Kpd - TO?, ai
L I
(After the first three words in the Greek: 'While we hymn Father and Son and
Holy Spirit let all creation sing amen, amen, Praise, Power ... to the one Giver
of all good things, amen, amen.)
The music of the hymn
following series of notes:
R
f
is written down in letters which form the
or
a
i I
d' e' f'
According to the Isagoge of Alypius, a musical theorist of the fourth
century, these letters are used for the diatonic Hypolydian scale. Set
above the letters are a number of dynamic signs, strokes, dots,
hyphens, leimmata (pauses), and colons. The Greek notation of the
hymn and the anapaestic metre of the text led some scholars to see
in it the last example of classical Greek music: they took it as a proof
that Greek pagan influence can be traced in early Christian music. 2
Analysis of the structure of the music, however, shows that the melody
1
Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ed. A. S. Hunt, Part xv, No. 1786, pp. 21-25.
2
Cf. H. Abert, 'Bin neuentdeckter fruhchristlicher Hymnus mit antiken Musik-
noten', Zeitschrift ftir Musikwissenschaft, iv (1921-2), pp. 528-9.