| B | C | D | E | F | G | A |
| Saturn | Jupiter | Mars | Sun | Venus | Mercury | Moon |
| Saturday | Sunday | Monday | ||||
| B | C | D | E | F | G | A |
| Saturn | Jupiter | Mars | Sun | Venus | Mercury | Moon |
| Tuesday | Wednesday | |||||
| B | C | D | E | F | G | A |
| Saturn | Jupiter | Mars | Sun | Venus | Mercury | Moon |
| Thursday | Friday |
The days of the week in French show much more clearly than in English the names of the planets, in the case of Tuesday—mardi, (Mars); Wednesday—mercredi (Mercury); Thursday—jeudi, (Jupiter); Friday—vendredi, (Venus).
The Greeks brought their instrument, the kithara, to Rome, and with it a style of song called a kitharoedic chant, which was usually a hymn sung to some god or goddess. The words, until three hundred years after the birth of Jesus, were in the Greek language; the Latin kitharoedic songs like those of the poets Horace and Catullus were sung at banquets and private parties, Cicero too, was musical.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Chinese Instruments.
Fig. 5.—Trumpets.
Fig. 6.—Te’ch’ing—sonorous stone.
Fig. 7.—Yang-Ch’in or Dulcimer.
Fiddles from Arabia (Fig. 8, Rebab); Japan (Fig. 9, Kokin); Corea (Fig. 10, Haggrine) and Siam (Fig. 11, See Saw Duang).
Edward MacDowell in Critical and Historical Essays, says that instrumental music was no longer used merely to accompany voices and had become quite independent. The flute (aulos) players performed better than the lyre and kithara players and were liked better. They played “dressed in long feminine, saffron (yellow)-colored robes, with veiled faces, and straps around their cheeks to support the muscles of the mouth.” They played with an astonishing amount of technical skill. “Even women became flute players, although this was considered disgraceful.” The prices paid to these flute players were higher than the amounts received by our opera singers.
The Roman theatre, unlike the Greek, was not a place to honor their gods. Greek plays, both tragedy and comedy, were replaced with pantomime, usually accompanied by orchestra and singing. The orchestra was made up of “cymbals, gongs, castanets, foot castanets, rattles, flutes, bagpipes, gigantic lyres, and a kind of shell or crockery cymbals, which were clashed together.”
The Roman tibia or bagpipe is still popular today with the peasants of Italy. Although the bagpipe is first mentioned in Rome, there are some Persian terra cotta figures made before the Roman era, showing players of the bagpipes. It is always said that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned and even our motion pictures show him playing the violin to the accompaniment of flames. How could he have played on a violin when it had not as yet been invented? If he played any instrument while Rome burned, it was probably the tibia.