  What then are the musical forms to which Plato and Aristotle ascribe this remarkable efficacy? And what is the source of their influence on human emotion and character? There are two obvious relations in which the scales employed in any system of music may stand to each other. They may be related as two keys of the same mode in modern music: that is to say, we may have to do with a scale consisting of a fixed succession of intervals, which may vary in pitch—may be 'transposed,' as we say, from one pitch or key to another. Or the scales may differ as the Major mode differs from the Minor, namely in the order in which the intervals follow each other. In modern music we have these two modes, and each of them may be in any one of twelve keys. It is evidently possible, also, that a name such as Dorian or Lydian might denote a particular mode taken in a particular key—that the scale so called should possess a definite pitch as well as a definite series of intervals. According to the theory which appears now to prevail among students of Greek music, these famous names had a double application. There was a Dorian mode as well as a Dorian key, a Phrygian mode and a Phrygian key, and so on. This is the view set forth by Boeckh in the treatise which may be said to have laid the foundations of our knowledge of Greek music (De Metris Pindari, lib. III. cc. vii-xii). It is expounded, along with much subsidiary speculation, in the successive volumes which we owe to the fertile pen of Westphal; and it has been adopted in the learned and excellent Histoire et ThÉorie de la Musique de l'AntiquitÉ of |
|
