DICTIONARY OF MUSIC - El Atril

GREEK MUSIC GREEN 231
H. Singing and Instrumental Music. —
Music was pre-eminently song for the Greeks.
Instrumental music was mainly accompaniment
of the voice. The rise and fall of the melody
corresponds in tlie main to the rise and fall of
the spoken words denoted by the accents, whicli
were marks not of stress but of pitch (see
Aristoxenus, ed. Meibom, p. 18, 1. 14).
Harmony in the modern sense of tire term
(as the musical relation of notes sounded
siviulUmeously) was rudimentary among the
Ancient Greeks, and consisted in an optional,
single-[iart accompaniment above the melody,
which latter not only was the predominant tune^
but also supplied in itself the unit}- and founda-
tion which the bass and otlier parts so frequently
supply in modern music.
I. Notations.—There are two sets of signs,
one for the voice (tire irpper in the Table of
keys given in D), the other for the instrument.
The trrst are clearly the letters of the ordinary
Ionic alphabet ; tire second have been explained
by Vincent and Bellermann as adapted from
the cabalistic signs for the heavenly bodies, but
with more plausibility by Westphal as the first
fourteen letters of an old Doric alphabet. These
fifteen characters (two forms of X are used), and
the letters from which they are taken, are as
follows
HhE l-r^FCKn