The music of Hindostan - Ibiblio

—
;
142 MODE
two tetrachords ' : for if modern Indian rdgas are analysed they
will be founds if ' pm-e ' or *^ mixed', to contain from one to five
possible points of conjunction ; if ' altered \ more.
So that the arma ^ seems to take exactly the place of the mcae in
Greek music, and has the same sort of satellites round it. Mad,-
hyama, ' middle/ accurately translates mese, and it is
on the face of
it likely that they named originally the same musical fact. We
must digress for a moment to discuss madhyama.
It is noticeable that only two notes of the scale have names with
an assignable meaning madhyama, middle, and pancama, fifth.
Sadja (' born of six ') might make a similar claim ; but the explanations
of it have hitherto been fanciful.^ Madhyama and
pancama are next door neighbours, and of these madhyama appears
to be the older name, i. e. to be applicable to an earlier state of the
scale ; for (1) they can hardly be contemporaries, otherwise they
would have been called caturtha (fourth) and pancama, and (2) since
no other note is named by an ordinal number this particular note
pancama appears to be so named for distinction, possibly from the
madhyama (with which it constantly disputed the hegemony).
From the earliest times the scale is quoted as consisting of seven
notes, the eighth being a repetition; and the madhyama divides
these seven, in the same way as the mese, into two tetrachords.
It may be added that as the other four notes of the scale (Umhha.
Gdndhdra, Bhaivata, and Nishdda) are all
apparently place names,
they may have been adopted into the scale as the local way of
passing from one end of the tetrachord to the other, and hence are
of the same nature as the Greek klnoumenoi ; and this survives
also in the modern scale, for it is these notes, and no others, which
are liable to be made flat {komal) and very flat [atiko7?ial).
But by Bharata's time all the eight notes are clearly defined;
they are, as we should write them, (C) D E F G A B C, because the
old theory names the upper extremity of the svara.
The madhyama
is the note G in a scale C-C, not, as before, in a heptachord D-C
and he has a great deal to say about it. It is the ' eldest ' (pravara),
the 'imperishable' {andmi), the 'note fixed by the singers of the
Sdmaveda in the Gandharvakalpa ' (musical treatise), the ' note
* The word means a part ' ' of a whole. Since it appears in manuscripts
indifferently with anga (' part'), which is a name for the tetrachord, amia may
originally have meant tetrachord (i.e. ' part' of the whole nmrchana) , and later
the note on which the tetrachord started. 8 ggg Chapter X.