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<font face="Calibri">Dimitar,<br>
<br>
Otto Gombosi wrote in his 1939 thesis:<br>
</font>
<blockquote><font face="Calibri">Nirgends im ganzen antiken
Schriftum ist jemals von "phrygischen" oder "lydischen"
Tetrachorden die Rede; es gibt eben nur eine Art von Tetrachord,
die "dorische", die aber auch niemals so benannt wurde. Folglich
ist auch niemals davon die Rede, daß die Oktavgattungen aus zwei
Tetrachorden zusammengesetzt sind. (<i>Tonarten und Stimmungen...</i>,
p. 14)<br>
<br>
Nowhere in the whole Antique literature is there ever question
of "Phrygian" or "Lydian" tetrachords; there is only one form of
tetrachord, the "Dorian" one, which however is never so named.
As a result, there is also nowhere question that the octave
genres were formed of two tetrachords.<br>
</font></blockquote>
'Tonos', in Greek, had several meanings, including 'pitch' and
'interval' (the word generally refers to 'tension', say the tension
in a string or that between two notes). The Greek, however, also had
the term 'hemitonos', 'semitone' (i.e. 'half a tone', obviously),
which leaves little doubt about one meaning of 'tonos', 'tone'
(major second) in our modern sense. 'Diatonic' refers to the mobile
degrees between the outer limits of the tetrachord being a tone
apart ('dia tonoi', 'through tones'). <br>
<br>
Your definition of diatonic as denoting a distance between two notes
with different names is a correct <u>modern</u> description (it
corresponds to Gevaert's definition of 1906 that I quoted earlier).
In the case of Ancient Greek tetrachords, were they diatonic,
chromatic or enharmonic, the four degrees certainly had four
different names: your definition cannot apply.<br>
<br>
Medieval theory also knew only one form of the tetrachord,
re–mi–fa–sol, and the various modes differed from each other in that
they placed their final on another degree of the tetrachord: on re
for the re modes, on mi for the mi modes, etc. (One tetrachord was
the notorious "tetrachord of the finals", already in Hucbald, who
may have been the earliest Western theorist to speak of finals.)
Because modes could be either authentic or plagal, there were 8
modes in all. It is as simple as that.<br>
<br>
The idea that octave genres, or scalar modes, are each formed of two
tetrachords (be they Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian for the Greek modes,
or Major, Harmonic, or whatever for modern scales) is a 19th-century
mistake, that has been proved false in the case of Ancient and
Medieval music and that it may be time we abandon for more recent
music as well. It has proved extremely harmful in the case of Arabic
music, when Western scholars went to the Cairo Congress of 1932 and
'reformed' Arabic theory which, they thought, should somehow
duplicate their mistaken ideas about Ancient music. <br>
<br>
Nicolas Meeùs<br>
University Paris-Sorbonne<br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font><br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 2013-12-03 08:37, Ninov, Dimitar N a
écrit :<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:7F2C6E04297A2E4BBF81D4F6F48838990F025055@exchmbx3.matrix.txstate.edu"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Dear Colleagues,
I have a Greek colleague who translates dia-tonic as "between two tones", a tone having the meaning of a pitch, accent, melodic fragment, or even a scale.
Diatonic is an affair between two tones with different names. For example, out of context, any whole tone or semitone between two notes with different names will be diatonic, while, any such whole tone or semitone between the same note and its chromatic alteration will be chromatic. For instance, the spaces C-D and C-Db are diatonic by nature, while C-Cx and C-C# are chromatic. This is written in an elementary theory of Music by late Prof. Parashkev Hadjiev, which I studied some 35 years ago.
As for tetrachords: Ionian has the semitone in the end; Dorian - in the middle, and Phrygian - in the beginning. By combining these tetrachords with the whole tone tetrachod (Lydian), one obtains the old modes.
Thank you,
Dimitar
Dr. Dimitar Ninov, Lecturer
School of Music
Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, Texas 78666
</pre>
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