Taruskin Msica

When musicians thought theoretically about musicthat is, made systematic

generalizations about
itbefore the tenth century, they usually did so in terms of the quadrivium, the late
classical !ostgraduate
curriculum, in "hich music counted as one of the arts of measurement#
$t# %ugustine&s treatise, com!leted in '(), is the sole survivor from an enormous
!ro*ected set of treatises
that "ould have encom!assed the "hole liberal arts curriculum# +t covers nothing but
rhythmic !ro!ortions
,quantitative metrics- and contains a famous definition of musicas bene modulandi
scientia, the art of
measuring "ellthat "as quoted as official doctrine by !ractically every later
medieval "riter#
- .oethius&s treatise covers much more ground than %ugustine&s# +t consists largely of
translations
from the /ellenistic "riters 0icomachus and 1tolemy
- +t thus became the
sole source of medieval kno"ledge of 2reek music theory, "hich included the 2reater
1erfect $ystem, a scale
constructed out of fournote segments called tetrachords3 and also the 1ythagorean
classification of
consonances ,simultaneous intervals#
.oethius inherited t"o transcendent ideas from the 0eo!latonists4 first, that Musica
mirrored the essential
harmony of the cosmos ,an idea "e have already encountered in %ugustine-3 and,
second, that o"ing to this
divine reflection it had a decisive influence on human health and behavior# This "as
kno"n as the doctrine
of ethos, from "hich the "ord ethics is derived#
5ne "ho has mastered Musica, .oethius concluded, and only such a one, can truly
*udge the "ork of a
musician, "hether com!oser or !erformer# The com!oser and !erformer are after all
concerned only "ith
music, a subrational art, "hile the !hiloso!her alone kno"s Musica, a rational science#
T50%6+7$
%mong the earliest documents "e have for the 8arolingian reorganization of the liturgy
and the
institutionalization of 2regorian chant are the manuscri!ts, "hich begin to a!!ear soon
after 1e!in&s time,
that grou! anti!hons ,re!resented by their inci!its or o!ening "ords- according to the
!salm tones "ith
"hich they best accord melodically# These lists, "hich began to a!!ear long before the
9ranks had invented
any sort of neumatic notation, at first took the form of !refaces and a!!endices to the
early 9rankish
graduals and anti!honers that contained the te:ts to be sung at Mass and 5ffice# ,The
earliest a!!endi: of
this kind is found in a gradual dated ;(<#- .y the middle of the tenth century, these lists
had gro"n large
enough to fill se!arate books for "hich the term tonarius or tonary "as coined#
+n effect, a cor!us of actual melodies inherited from one tradition ,!resumed to be that
of 6ome, the seat of
Western 8hristianity- "as being com!ared "ith, and assimilated to, an abstract
classification of melodic
turns and functions im!orted from another tradition ,the oktoechos, or eightmode
system, of the .yzantine
church-# The result "as something neither 6oman nor 2reek but s!ecifically 9rankish
and tremendously
fertile, a trium!h of imaginative synthesis#
There are four "ays a
fifth can be filled in "ithin the aurally internalized diatonic !itch set, "ith its !reset
arrangement of tones,T- and semitones ,$-# +n the order of the tonaries these "ere ,)-
T$TT, ,=- $TTT, ,'- TTT$, and ,>- TT$T#
What is identified in this "ay are scale degrees# The notion of scale degrees, and their
identification, thus
constitutes from the very beginningand, one is tem!ted to add, to the very endthe
crucial theoretical
generalization on "hich the conce!t of tonality in Western music rests
The ending notes of these four s!eciesdefining segments?, 7, 9, and 2"ere
dubbed the four finals in
9rankish tonal theory and named ,in kee!ing "ith the .yzantine derivation of the mode
system- according
to their 2reek ordinal numbers4 !rotus ,first-, deuterus ,second-, tritus ,third-, and
tetrardus ,fourth-
res!ectively# ,The fifth %@7 "as considered a doubling, or trans!osition, of the first
segment3 hence % "as
functionally equivalent to ? as a final#-
Those "ith the final at
the bottom of their range "ere said to be in authentic tonalities or modes, "hile those
that e:tended lo"er
than their finals, so that the final occurred in the middle of their range, "ere called
!lagal, from the 2reek
!lagios, a "ord derived directly from the vocabulary of the oktoechos, "here it referred
to the four