question about modes,keys,scales

[gaggle of hermits]

Or, for that matter, online English translations of Archytas and Boethius.

you can for Boethius. I'm not posting a link as it's still in copyright but you can find a pdf: add "bower" and "fundamentals of music" to the terms in a search engine. you will find it's available at a certain archive site.

frankly, you'd be better off with "the critical nexus" by Charles Atkinson. the cheapest online/ebook option is through google play. imo, it's one of the best books on how early western music theory developed.

but, frankly, if you're a beginner as stated in the OP, I'd get to grips with some more modern music concepts and skip all the ancient modes stuff for the moment. you've started with a bunch of ill-conceived premises and it's all spiralled out of control from there.

[shawshawraw]

Well said, thanks for explaining!

[jancivil]

I have really, genuinely no supposition of what Ancient Greek's music was at any juncture. I did however get heavily into studying rational intonation, I wanted to have the chops one would need in order to build a new guitar-like instrument; but that did 22 JI tones, 10 of 12 have a neighbor at a syntonic comma away while "tonic" and "perfect fifth" are inviolate, after Danielou in Ragas of Northern India. The syn. comma gives a perfect 3:2 from each is the idea, and it's a very coherent and simple idea. So I pored over all of that theory of the smaller intervals before I had any plan. I spent all day in the library for a long time, the big main one in SF.

Don't expect no one will catch you out, you don't know what people know from. I'm not going to bother, it insults our intelligence trying to get away with faking it.

[mattrix3]

Thanks gaggle for your advice with references.

"Wow I’m totally lost. What does all this have to do to understand modes, keys, scales "

I'm not sure how I ended up here either. But since I have could someone clarify a few things about Greek systems for me.
I thought I had worked out the up/down thing, but when I put it all together I ended up with Hypodorian using a higher pitched set of notes than Dorian uses, which seems wrong. Is this correct?

... bear in mind the way the ancient greeks actually composed and used music, which has very little commonality with the conventions formulated by monks in the Middle Ages for use in church though the greek texts were used as inspiration.

Could you please elaborate on these differences?

From my reading I get the impression that the diatonic genus (tone, tone, semitone) was an invention of the theorists, but that its construction would have been distasteful to the Ancient Greeks, suggesting it wasn't used much?
Cleonides reports a 'soft diatonic' (2.5 semitones, 1.5 semitones, 1 semitone) that may have been more palatable?

[BertKoor]

No one really knows how ancient Greek music sounded. Some notation fragments survived, but attempts at interpretation of full songs resulted in what's best described as gibberish. So it's probably lost forever.

Here's an article on a recent reconstruction:
https://theconversation.com/ancient-gre ... like-99895

or if you rather watch / listen instead of read:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y

[gaggle of hermits]

Bert's right. however, there are some things we do understand about greek music that mark out what the medieval theorists were doing was likely quite different to greek practice or even Ancient Greek theory. for one, the greeks were having fun with music, with a strong emphasis on the kinds of rhythm you find in poetry. the monks were emphasising the opposite of fun with their proposed rules on modes etc: everything was tuned for religious worship with little detectable rhythm. (bards in the local taverns were having fun but their stuff isn't well documented.)

here's ML West (Ancient Greek Music, Cambridge Press) on what is reasonably well understood from contemporary descriptions of what music was like and how it was used in Ancient Greece:

"Words like 'lyreless' are...used to convey the joylessness of death and other miseries."

"Music is constantly associated with the idea of celebration."

second, though there seem to be hymn-like 'paeans' in Ancient Greek culture, with very short and simple incantations, a lot of the emphasis seems to be on the words (and lots of them) when music is described, and that's borne out by one of the surviving extracts, the seikilos epitaph salvaged from a tombstone:

West again: "One can do other things melodically with the voice besides singing. One can hum, yodel, imitate bird or animal cries, or croon wordlessly. The Greeks, however, did not exploit these possibilities for musical purposes. Nor did they have songs composed partly or wholly of nonsense syllables, as some peoples do. On the contrary, their songs (so far as our knowledge goes) were settings of thoroughly articulate, often highly sophisticated poetic texts, with little verbal repetition. Hence it was important that the words should be clearly heard and not submerged in instrumental sound."

contrast that with the plainchant for which the medieval modes were contrived, even if they had an influence from Ancient Greek theory. the words aren't clear at all: a single "kyrie" can last for something like ten seconds by the time the monks have applied melisma to every last syllable (though it's possible the paeans were like that). a lot was transmitted via the byzantine traditions, which evolved out of roman practice, which similarly had connections to greek culture.

there was also "parakatologe" or parallel recital, which was spoken word with a musical accompaniment, basically rap though probably the meter was similar to Shakespeare's verse. those two examples were what I was referring to earlier when talking about different approaches.

I ended up with Hypodorian using a higher pitched set of notes than Dorian uses

on the hypodorian, I have no idea what you ended up with or why. however, if you mean the one described by glarean, it's a plagal mode that extends from the A below middle C to the A above. however, it's not equivalent to minor/Aeolian as such, because the rules set out for hypodorian keep the final at D but with the reciting note or "tenor" moving to F.

there is a hypodorian mode described in some greek texts but this is not connected to the western church modes: the conjecture is that it's got a couple of sharpened forms of E and B in it based on a description of how the tetrachords were modified. because some accounts call "aeolian" the old name for hypodorian, there's sometimes the assumption it's the same as western/modern aeolian – but it almost certainly wasn't.

[mattrix3]

Thanks for elaborating gaggle.

I was referring to the Ancient Greek modes, as described by Cleonides but I assume others had the same. He defines the modes by their position inside the Greater Perfect System, but he is not clear about which is the highest pitch note in the GPS.

[TribeOfHǫfuð]

Wow I’m totally lost. What does all this have to do to understand modes, keys, scales as of today…

Well, if his interests are historical rather than applied, it is more than okay to ask, imo. Tho it is a tough entry point for a beginner I must say, and you got to have your basic premises right before asking questions about nuanced specifics. As far using scales as modes in a general sense, we already passed the point of total overkill in the beginning of the OP, so I guess it is history and development that are on topic. Thanks Freya, we have people around to keep track of that ^^^, for if the historical deal does not provide concrete techniques within minutes, I lose patience myself. But the knowledge is deffo worth preserving, not at least to reconstruct ancient music (Bertkoor´s link).

[gaggle of hermits]

I was referring to the Ancient Greek modes, as described by Cleonides but I assume others had the same. He defines the modes by their position inside the Greater Perfect System, but he is not clear about which is the highest pitch note in the GPS.

looking at the one that appears online, hypodorian seems to cover the entire GPS, which doesn't seem right and doesn't seem to fit with the idea that it's below (hypo) dorian. however, there are two forms that run effectively A->A either across the upper pair of tetrachords or the lower pair of tetrachords - hypodorian happens to be the only mode that can fit completely into those four tetrachords.

[mattrix3]

Well, if his interests are historical rather than applied, it is more than okay to ask, imo. Tho it is a tough entry point for a beginner I must say, and you got to have your basic premises right before asking questions about nuanced specifics. As far using scales as modes in a general sense, we already passed the point of total overkill in the beginning of the OP, so I guess it is history and development that are on topic. Thanks Freya, we have people around to keep track of that ^^^, for if the historical deal does not provide concrete techniques within minutes, I lose patience myself. But the knowledge is deffo worth preserving, not at least to reconstruct ancient music (Bertkoor´s link).

Pretty much where I'm at now ^^^^.

Music is a facet of life that I should have learned about, but never did. To me it is an amorphous mass full of arcane concepts. A piece of music either pleases me or it doesn't, it can play with my emotions as if I was a piece of fluff in the wind, but I have no idea of why or how.

I don't know what my basic premises are, maybe "you start with the facts and build the practice around them?"; my motivation is not to be able to 'perform', but to try and fill that gap in my education and try to understand music. I am pecking around the outside picking up little bits and pieces along the way but finding every 'point of entry' difficult. I expected my basic questions would attract relatively objective and reasoned answers, not controversy and ridicule, where I would be called upon to justify every word I uttered.

Interesting article of Bert's, a small extract that explains why I'm here,

Second, I showed that if the quarter-tones functioned as “passing-notes”, the composition was in fact tonal (focused on a pitch to which the tune regularly reverts). This should not be very surprising, as such tonality exists in all the documents of ancient music from later centuries

I am sure this makes sense to the initiated, but things like this raise lots of questions for me that I just can't answer, "Isn't church music focused on the 'tenor'?",

EDIT: Sorry. I went on a bit of a rant there.
I guess I have figured if I can't crack the nut, I could at least work out where it came from and how it got here, and might learn something about it along the way.
"history and development"

[gaggle of hermits]

as I wrote a day or two ago, you're pecking at fragments on the interwebz which for most things is almost guaranteed to lead to confusion. you'd be way better off getting a decent book on music theory as it's practised now and then digging into the history side. also, history is unlikely to give you the information I suspect you actually want which is the why – and that's still a moving target that combines psychology with musicology. "sweet anticipation" by David huron is pretty in-depth on where that discipline is headed.

the problem you are going to have with ancient and medieval scholarship is that these guys thought there were fixed and immutable principles that govern music and that music theory was a branch of science. they weren't alone. newton and Kepler tried to continue this but failed for reasons we can now see as obvious.

as an example of getting confused by stuff on the interwebz, let's take Bert's link on the aulos chorus. I'm just a rank amateur but I've got some issues with the way D'Angour presents his work in that article. he's actually a bit more circumspect in other articles. getting a replica aulos, working out how to play and remaking a piece of music from fragments is a good result but presenting the Orestes fragment itself as a choir+aulos combo is to me a bit of a stretch. the greeks loved the aulos, but I'm not convinced they would use it in this way on that piece of music. the aulos was considered a bit uncouth - more a street instrument for dances than something you'd use for serious verse. remember that bit from Martin West's book yesterday about needing to hear the words? it seems far more likely that the presentation would have been voices + lute, as the lute doesn't obscure the words (though it's possible the philosophers were a bit snobby and considered the aulos the autotune of their day - and didn't represent real-world attitudes).

also, D'Angour's use of "tonality" in that article is bound to cause confusion as, if you look at the context, he's not talking about the tonal system as a modern musicologist would think of it, really just the repetition of an important base tone - which is found in just about every music system around the world, western or otherwise. his conclusion makes me wonder whether he's been living under a rock: medieval scholars were cheerfully borrowing from greek philosophers left, right and centre. add to that the likelihood that a lot of unnotated music would have been transmitted via byzantine practice into Western Europe in the dark and middle ages (and would inevitably have been cross-pollinated with greek and middle-eastern practices). so I'd take anything in that article with a large handful of salt other than there's barely any surviving music examples from those times in notated form and it's a struggle to reconstruct it.

[mattrix3]

I apologize gaggle,

You missed the qualifier "a small extract that explains why I'm here, "

I did realize that statement was suspect, but 2 months ago I would have accepted it at face value made by an expert. That statement was one of any number on the media and I won't always have you around to tell me where to apply the salt.

[gaggle of hermits]

You missed the qualifier "a small extract that explains why I'm here, "

no I didn't, you followed the passage with a question about tenor notes, which I didn't answer explicitly. i was trying to show that the passage wasn't necessarily at odds with church music's conventions on what notes get emphasis.

[shawshawraw]

Music is a facet of life that I should have learned about, but never did. To me it is an amorphous mass full of arcane concepts. A piece of music either pleases me or it doesn't, it can play with my emotions as if I was a piece of fluff in the wind, but I have no idea of why or how.

I don't know what my basic premises are, maybe "you start with the facts and build the practice around them?"; my motivation is not to be able to 'perform', but to try and fill that gap in my education and try to understand music. I am pecking around the outside picking up little bits and pieces along the way but finding every 'point of entry' difficult. I expected my basic questions would attract relatively objective and reasoned answers, not controversy and ridicule, where I would be called upon to justify every word I uttered.

Just keep in mind that notes and pitches and harmonies are an incomplete facet of how a piece of music impacts people. Equally important are tone/timbre, groove, intonation/articulation. If there's vocal, the way the lyrics rhyme, the lengths of lines... Taking about sonics, we consider how the space/reverb sounds, how the artificial delay/chorus/etc. effects sounds if in a modern production... The weights of each facet pretty much depend on the kind of music you're into, tho!

I appreciate your objectives! Over 80% of people I know in real life don't care about music at all.

[mattrix3]

the problem you are going to have with ancient and medieval scholarship is that these guys thought there were fixed and immutable principles that govern music and that music theory was a branch of science. they weren't alone. newton and Kepler tried to continue this but failed for reasons we can now see as obvious.

I am scientifically oriented.
I just finished a series of lectures about the History of Music and Science. Not so much the science of music, but the advances made in math and science due to Music Theorists.
It was very interesting but I can see how it would be a hard slog if you were not comfortable with the mathematical concepts.

. you'd be way better off getting a decent book on music theory

Can you recommend one that has a scientific bent and explains the why of what they say?

I don't think any of the books you have linked to were meant to fill this purpose.

I am working on getting the Atkinson book. I have an ebook reader on my computer, but am having trouble working out what to do with the encryption/DRM stuff.