divergence in certain pairs of notes of the two embodiments and a relation of coincidence in the remainder.[1]
The representative nomenclature of the modern key system is distinguished from that of the later Greeks and that of the ancient Chinese by the recognition of two notes as alternative standards of comparison, neither of the two being that below the three tones (Fa, Koung), which was the note used both in Greece and in China. These two notes are the note below the group of two notes (called Do or C in the mediæval scale) and the note between the upper two of the group of three (called La or A in the mediæval scale). This change is a victory of practice over theory. To the musical theorist, Fa, as the note of generation, the origin of the scale, is its limiting and ruling one. To the listener to music any note on which his mind has learned to dwell becomes beginning and end, foundation and summit, of the scale. This practical predominance of a note is in contemporary discussion called Tonality.[2]
In the course of the development of Catholic Plain Song mediæval music-hearers acquired the habit of regarding either of the notes Do, Re, Mi, Sol, La, of the diatonic scale as the predominant one of a composition, this place being never assigned to Si, and but rarely to Fa. We have already argued in seeking to explain the flatting of pien-Tche that a feeling of the tonality of the theoretically prominent note Fa is incompatible with the maintenance of Si in its normal position. A like remark applies to Si in its turn, and to this cause is due the avoidance by the mediæval musicians of these two tonalities.[3]
Finally, in modern times, three of the five commonly used in church music were abandoned, and musical textures fell into
- ↑ The character of different keys is made by Hauptmann (Harmonik und Metrik, 279) to depend upon these conceptions of upward and downward displacement. "Every key which in comparison with another contains notes chromatically raised will seem higher and tenser; and one which differs from another through chromatically lower notes will seem deeper, quieter, more relaxed."
- ↑ The term used by Helmholtz (Tonempfindungen, 4th edn., p. 395), following Fétis, in the sense of a "definite reference of all the notes of the scale to a single principal and fundamental note, the Tonic."
- ↑ The inharmonious relation of these two notes is expressed in the mediæval proverb, "Si contra Fa diabolus est in musica."
