Welcome back to Between the Barlines! I hope you’re enjoying learning more about music in the antiquity! We spent a lot of last episode talking about eastern influences on music, so if you missed that, be sure to check that out! Today, we are going to chat about Ancient Greece and how much of what happened in the centuries between Babylonian times and the 1st Century AD have shaped the foundation of music.
	
	We left off in our last episode where I mentioned an important artifact, the Epitaph of Seikilos, which is known to be the first complete, notated, and decipherable musical composition. This was found only a few hundred years ago by scholars and dates back to the 1st century AD. This music, inscribed on a tombstone, has been decoded by scholars to be a diatonic melody utilizing the phrygian octave species and covers a range of about an octave. 

	Buckle up - we are about to get into the weeds with some theory to help understand more about this specific piece of music! In the case of the Epitaph, the phrygian octave species doesn’t correlate to the church mode of phrygian that we mostly use today. Centuries old philosopher Aristoxenus has two surviving works called “Harmonic Elements” and “Rhythmic Elements.” In order to learn more about tetrachords, intervals, and scales, we will focus on unpacking “Harmonic Elements.” There are 3 different genera or genus classes of tetrachords: diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic. The two outer pitches stay the same, while the inner pitches change. These tetrachords can be layered successively to create melodies larger than a 4th. Referring back to the phrygian octave species, this octave species and others derive firstly from a tetrachord.
	
A successor of Aristoxenus, Cleonides, stated in his writing, “Harmonic Introduction,”  “that in the diatonic genus the three main consonances of perfect 4th, 5th, and octave [can be] subdivided into tones and semitones.” These were called “species,” seven of which can be created at the octave level. The phrygian octave series begins from the 3rd note of the species, which was D. So again, when referring to the phrygian octave series here, we are referring to 2 tetrachords successively stacked next to one another. When beginning this series on D, the pattern is as follows: TST-TTST. Here is what it sounds like on an equal-tempered piano. [MUSIC] As previously stated, this does not line up with the church mode Phyrgian that begins with a half-step or a lowered 2nd scale degree. We are technically hearing the church mode of Dorian, another minor based mode with a raised 6th scale degree. Along with the phrygian octave series, there are 6 other recognized octave species with similar names to the church modes. A quick list of them, starting on the first note of the scale (remember that is B in this case) is Mixolydian, followed by Lydian, and then Phyrgian. Each of the first three octave species have pairings. Starting on the 4th member of the scale, E, the octave species names are as follows: dorian, hypolydian, and hypophrygian. Hypodorian, the 7th and final octave species, does not have a pair and happens to be the most familiar to us today; this octave species sounds like our natural minor scale.

An amazing feature of exploring these species of consonances a little closer is that they have been proven useful to understand more music than just ancient Greek music; Burkholder states that it is also used to help understand medieval chant, renaissance polyphony, and some modern music. 

To summarize, the way that scales and modes were looked at prior to the church are different from how we recognize them today. The epitaph of Seikilos is a way to observe and study the difference between ancient Greek music and modality comparatively to how we know it to be today. In the next episode, we will begin to scratch the surface on how the church in the West further shaped the development of musical notation and created new ways of creating music. Join me next time on Between the Barlines.

Information taken from personal notes, Burkholder’s History of Western Music, and various aurally cited websites.