The Music of Hindostan c10.64

c10.64

Students of ancient Greek music agree in this, that there came a time when the *Harmoniā* was replaced by the *Tonos*. The change may have taken centuries; it was placed on record by Ptolemy (A.D. 150). The *Harmoniā*² (lit. joint, union, apposition), which was a section of the gamut consisting of two conjunct tetrachords, was not associated with any definite pitch, but adaptable according to the singer’s needs. The *Tonos* (lit. tension, pitch) was likewise a section of the gamut, but consisted of two tetrachords *plus* the disjunctive tone (which might be between them or beyond them) and formed a complete octave, each *Tonos* being calculated from the same pitch. There seems to be no record in the ancient writers of the *Tonoi* having been sung upon a drone-note; Gevaert makes no mention of it, and to ison, the modern word for drone, is not in Liddell & Scott. But Pachtikos¹ speaks of the drone as being ‘an indisputable relic of the original musical system’. And though the silence of so observant a people as the Greeks is difficult to get over, it is just possible that they took so obvious a thing for granted.² In the *Harmoniā* the notes were related according to their ‘functions’ (*kata dunamin*); the extremes of the tetrachord were ‘fixed’ (*hestēkotes*), the intermediate notes were ‘movable’ (*kineisthai pephūkotes*, or *kīnoumenoi*) and were distributed within a certain prescribed ‘locus of variation’ (*topos tēs kinēseōs*). The ‘functions’ of the intermediate notes meant therefore, apparently, their relations to the extreme notes (of the tetrachord). In the *Tonos*, on the other hand, we see a segment of a stereotyped scale (of two octaves) in which the ‘functions’ of notes within the tetrachord are, though they still exist, no longer of importance, but the individual notes of the scale are related according to their ‘position’ (*kata thesin*) with regard to some one of the notes of this scale taken as tonic and, in India certainly—in Greece perhaps—supplied with a drone.