A Road Not Taken: Theinred of Dover's Theory of Species

Author:

Snyder John L.

Abstract

The music theory of the Middle Ages had its origins in the music theory of late antiquity. As Markovits observes, ‘The fundamental structure of ancient music theory is the tetrachord’; in turn, the medieval gamut had its origin in the Greater Perfect System, and was similarly constructed from conjunct and disjunct tetrachords. The chromatic and enharmonic genera disappeared, but the tetrachord synemmenon remained as the source of the only sanctioned medieval altered note, the B♭.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Music

Reference35 articles.

1. Burney, Charles , A General History of Music, repr ed Frank Mercer (New York, 1935). i, 675, says, among other things, that Book III of Theinred's treatise ‘contains Diagrams and Scales innumerable of different species of Octave’ (a remark that the reader will appreciate more fully by the end of this article), he complains of the ‘barbarism and obscurity of the Latin’ and concludes, ‘now, since the theory of Sound is so much better understood and explained by the writings of Galileo and many others, our old countryman, Theinred, may henceforth remain peaceably on his shelf, without much loss to the art or science of Music’ For a survey of the errors and other indignities to which other historians and bibliographers have subjected Theinred, see John L Snyder, ‘The De legitimis ordinibus pentachordorum et tetrachordorum of Theinred of Dover’ (Ph D dissertation, Indiana University, 1982), chap 1 One recent error should be noted here in Andrew Hughes, ‘Theinred of Dover’, The New Grove Dictionary, xvii, 731–2, the title of Theinred's treatise is given incorrectly Prof Hughes has informed me (private correspondence, 1981) that the erroneous title was inserted after proofs had been corrected Unfortunately, this error has been repeated in Michel Huglo, Bibliographie des éditions et études relatives à la théorie musicale du moyen âge'. Acta musicologica, 60 (1988), 264

2. Pesce, The Affinities, 20.

3. Pesce, The Affinities, 2–3, 36, 38 and passim

4. Theinred thus anticipates the later development of the concept of an infinite scale, on which see Hughes, Andrew , ‘Solmization’, §1, The New Grove Dictionary, xvii, 458–61, and Snyder, ‘The De legitimis‘, i, 97–8

5. Snyder, ‘The De legitimis’, ii Spelling has been normalized, except for a few characteristically medieval terms, the capitalization and punctuation of the manuscript (which are quite haphazard) have been freely emended Some errors in my previous version of the text have been silently corrected for this article I wish to acknowledge the assistance given me with the manuscript and the text by Hans Tischler and Ian Thomson of Indiana University, and by Mark Edward Clark of the University of Southern Mississippi, final responsibility for the reading of the text and the translation thereof rests of course with the author

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