The man’s voice was the guide, and from time immemorial the a has been the standard of pitch, by ruling of the ear.
(The A below middle C, top line, bass clef).
From father to son, from teacher to scholar the tradition of pitch was carried on. The string affected by heat and moisture and by the strain when twanged, never remains accurately to pitch. Although pipes and strings have run a parallel course, we do not find that the lyre players actually cared to refer to pipes as guiding them in setting the pitch. Yet it was the custom, so Plutarch tells us, for reciters and orators to have a pitch pipe sounded by an attendant to keep their voices to a prescribed pitch, and he mentions an ivory pipe being used for the practice. On the contrary it would seem that from the earliest times lyrists of all sorts, and players on stringed instruments of every nation, even up to the present day have found the habit of the ear sufficient for the purposes of their art, that indeed to the soloist, the musical ear relies upon itself for tuning.
By the Greeks music as an art was regarded as an aid to regulate by rule the inflections of the voice, to mark the places of emphasis and to define the pauses in the recitation of their epic poetry; and the rhythm of their songs followed strictly laws that had been laid down, innovation was reprehended, and even prohibited. The lyre itself was held subordinate to the voice, accompanying it and filling in the pauses according to a conventional fashion, which the hearers judged, critically and keenly.
We import our modern ways of speech upon musical subjects into the considerations of these matters, and necessarily so, but it is essential to a right apprehension to remember that the Greeks had no way of naming the sounds except by certain names given by them to the strings of the lyre, thus the forefinger string was called “lichanos” and the others had their distinctive appellations. They had no sense of a tonic as we have, no system of harmony, no musical stave, no use of letters, a, b, c, etc., to denote their music. In late times they devised a kind of letter-note method, curiously crude yet elaborate, of letters standing upside down, letters lying on the side, letters mutilated and signs for instrumental sounds different from those for the sounds of the voice, altogether 1,062 varied characters are stated as used, and this knowledge of their written music was by the merest accident preserved to us in a solitary manuscript, by Alypius, 115 A.D.
The only date known in the life of Terpander was the year when he gained the prize in the competition for singing, B.C. 676, at the Pythian games; some say that he also won at four festivals in succession. He may have been known to that Demaratus, mentioned page 68 ante, as the date connects them as contemporary. Some time later than this victory he is credited with having increased the number of strings from four to seven, but statements upon this question are very conflicting. Helmholtz says that he added but one string to the Cithara of six strings.
According to some ancient writers Chorebus, son of Altis, King of Lydia, he it was who commenced innovation by adding a fifth string. Hyagnis, who in the sixteenth century B.C. invented the Phrygian mode, added a sixth string; Terpander a seventh, and Lychasos an eighth; but Pliny says, Terpander added three strings to the orthodox four, that Simonides added an eighth and Timotheus a ninth. Anacreon as before stated had ten strings, and Timotheus increased the seven strings of the Spartan lyre to eleven. Pythagoras, by equal authority, was the reputed father of the eight-stringed lyre.
Through the maze of such traditions (and other statements I could quote, increasing the intricacy for the benefit of research) I have had to make my way, and decide as best I could, upon a line of connected record.
So, pending an alternative view to be offered presently, I elect to follow Pliny and allow to Terpander the claim to the increase of the scale of the tetrachord by a trichord above a, the highest sound of the four-stringed lyre.
Our scale system is based on a tonic sound, and we read upward, but the Greeks in their music thought downwards, and by the laws, the tonic was, in the structure of tetrachords, barred out, for the a was the master tone, and between it and g no semitone was allowed, though what necessity existed for this essential feature of the formation, no explanation is apparent.