We really have no notation to express the actual relations of intervals, which exceed or are short of ours. Remember that the Greeks had three-quarter tones, one-and-a-quarter tones, and one-and-three-quarter tones; and combined these so as to make larger intervals, curiously varying, as you may judge by the eye.
D♯ otherwise E♭ I reckon to be the keynote. The mouthpiece I named as probably arranged to shift in position and lean towards the player, so as not to be exactly in line with the finger holes, and if the hole in the ivory tube was made larger than the hole entering from the mouthpiece, that convenience would easily be obtained. I should imagine that the transverse flute was in vogue at the time, and that this invention was designed, to afford the reed flute performer the facility to assume an attitude, which, maybe, was preferred by people of fashion.
The remarkable specimen of a transverse flute, found by Sir C. T. Newton, noticed at page 97, I give a description of in the final chapter, “How the Music grew.”
The high significance of these ringed flutes is that we have them as they were left by the hands that used them, arranged according to traditional observance of rules proper to the national melodies in which the people delighted. It is a record that tells us more than books or treatises teach us.
An accomplished Greek gentleman played to me to-day some of the music preserved in the ceremonials of the Greek church; believed to be the most ancient known, and still heard in wild melodies of the mountaineers. On the pianoforte it cannot be truly rendered; yet the character is ineffaceable, the music is indeed beautiful. It seems as it would never come to a close,—only pause in a divine expectancy.
CHAPTER VIII.
In Oscan Land.—Italia.
FOUND AT POMPEII.
THE GRECO-ROMAN FLUTES.