3. The Hebrews employed music in their celebration of religious worship, which consisted, in part, in chanting solemn psalms with instrumental accompaniments. It was also used by them on the occasion of entertainments, as well as in the family circle. It reached its greatest perfection amongst the Jews, in the days of David and Solomon. It is supposed, that the priests of Egypt were versed in music, before the settlement of the family of Jacob in that country; but how far the Israelites were indebted to them for a knowledge of this pleasing art, is altogether uncertain.
4. Music was held in very high estimation among the Greeks, who attributed to it incredible effects. They even assure us that it is the chief amusement of the gods, and the principal employment of the blessed in heaven. Many of their laws, and the information relative to the gods and heroes, as well as exhortations to virtue, were written in verse, and sung publicly in chorus to the sound of instruments.
5. It was the opinion of the philosophers of Greece, that music was necessary to mould the character of a nation to virtue; and Plato asserts, that the music of his countrymen could not be altered, without affecting the constitution of the state itself. But in his time and afterwards, complaints were made of the degeneracy in this art, and a deterioration of national manners through its influence. The degeneracy probably consisted in its application to the expression of the tender passions; it having been previously applied, in most cases, to awaken patriotic and religious feeling.
6. The invention of music and of musical instruments, as in the cases of most of the arts and sciences among the Greeks, was attributed by the poets to some of the gods, or else to individuals of their own nation. It appears, however, from their traditions, that they received this art, or at least great improvements in its execution, from Phœnicia or Asia Minor. It began to be cultivated scientifically in Greece about 600 years before the advent of Christ.
7. The Romans seem to have derived the music which they employed in religious services from the Etruscans, but that used in war and on the stage from the Greeks. At an early period of their history, it was a great impediment to the progress of the art, that it was practised only by slaves.
8. The Roman orators pitched their voice, and regulated the different intonations through their speech, by the sound of instruments; and on the stage, the song, as well as part of the play itself, was accompanied with flutes. Wind-instruments of various kinds, comprised under the general name of tibiæ, and sometimes the cythera and harp, accompanied the chorus. In all these applications of music, the Romans had been preceded by the Greeks.
9. The Hebrews employed accents to express musical tones, but most other nations of antiquity used letters of the alphabet for this purpose; and, as they had not yet conceived the idea of the octave or parallel lines, to express a variety of tones in a similar manner by the aid of a key, they required a number of notes that must have been exceedingly perplexing.
10. The Greeks are said to have had about one thousand notes, half of which were for vocal, and the other half, for instrumental music. All these were expressed by placing the letters of their alphabet, or parts of them, in different positions. Accents were also used, partly by themselves, and in connexion with the letters.
11. The lines of a poem, set to music, were placed under the letters expressing the tones. The letters for the instrumental part were placed first, and under them those for the voice. The notes of the Greeks and Romans were not required to indicate the time in which they were to be pronounced, since in general the syllables of their language had a natural and distinct quantity. In the cases in which there was a liability to mistake, the syllables were marked with A, if long, and with B, if short.
12. The Romans expressed the fifteen chief tones of the Greeks with the fifteen first letters of the Latin alphabet; and these were reduced to seven, by Pope Gregory I., towards the end of the sixth century; so that the first seven capital letters were used for the first octave, the small letters for the higher octave, and the small letters doubled, for the highest octave. Parallel lines were soon after invented, on which the letters were written.