The Music of Hindostan c10.71

c10.71

It is noticeable that only two notes of the scale have names with an assignable meaning—*madhyama*, middle, and *pañcama*, fifth. *Ṣaḍja* (‘born of six’) might make a similar claim; but the explanations of it have hitherto been fanciful.² *Madhyama* and *pañcama* are next door neighbours, and of these *madhyama* appears to be the older name, i.e. to be applicable to an earlier state of the scale; for (1) they can hardly be contemporaries, otherwise they would have been called *caturtha* (fourth) and *pañcama*, and (2) since no other note is named by an ordinal number this particular note *pañcama* appears to be so named for distinction, possibly from the *madhyama* (with which it constantly disputed the hegemony). From the earliest times the scale is quoted as consisting of seven notes, the eighth being a repetition; and the *madhyama* divides these seven, in the same way as the *mesē*, into two tetrachords. It may be added that as the other four notes of the scale (*Ṛṣabha*, *Gāndhāra*, *Dhaivata*, and *Niṣāda*) are all apparently place names, they may have been adopted into the scale as the local way of passing from one end of the tetrachord to the other, and hence are of the same nature as the Greek *kīnoumenoi*; and this survives also in the modern scale, for it is these notes, and no others, which are liable to be made flat (*komal*) and very flat (*atikomal*).