BOOK REVIEWS
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Greek and Latin Music Theory: Principles and
Challenges. By Edward Nowacki. Pp. xi þ 225.
Eastman Studies in Music. (University of
Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, and Boydell
& Brewer, Woodbridge, 2020. ISBN 978-1-
58046-995-1 (hard cover), »80; -78744-916-9
(ebook), »19.99.)
This book, so Edward Nowacki explains in his
introduction, is not an exhaustive study of every
theoreticaltreatise in Greekor Latin, but a collec-
tion of essays intended to help graduate students
above all who seek competence in the history of
music theory. Since I cannot speak to what an
American graduate student may be expected to
know, particularly in the matter of Greek theory,
Icannot say which explanations may be superflu-
ous or deficient; but I can say that that there is
much matter here to interest even the more
advanced reader. I must also point out that only
chapters 8 and 11 treat of authors later than the
twelfth century.
Part I is concerned with ancient Greek theory.
The first chapter concerns the harmoniai, which
Nowacki wisely refuses to call ‘modes’ since they
bore no relation to those known from medieval
theory with classical names wrongly applied.
The Greek word, with a basic sense of ‘fitting
together’ (it is found in Homer for compacts and
for joints on a raft), when used in relation to
music he takes to be originally a term not merely
for tuning systems but for melodic styles
accommodated to them. These styles were
associated with various affects, which without
the necessary acculturation would probably be
lost on us even if we could hear the music.
Westerners do not, on hearing an Indian raga, in-
stinctively fall into the feelings it is said to evoke;
besides which, Plato and Aristotle disagreed on
the moral qualities of the Phrygian harmonia,
medieval writers were not completely consistent
in their correlations of ethos and mode, and
modern composers have shown great divergence
in the moods they have associated with particular
keys. On page 18 it is surprising to see the dithy-
ramb called ‘a song in Phrygian meter’, since no
such metre existed; the potted history of the
Greek world on pages 13^15 assigns to Miletus
‘the’ pre-Socratic philosophers instead of
139
‘several’ and omits the Persian invasions of 480
and 480/79 BC.
However, as Nowacki observes in the next
chapter, theorists are inclined to equate harmoniai
with tonoi, to which he turns in chapter 2. After a
brief survey of their probable history, he
concentrates on their definitive state, which
entails explaining Greek nomenclature, The
order in which information is presented may be
questioned: in a brief introduction to ‘Alypian’
notation (pp. 28^9), whose reference tonos, using
no inflected pitches and therefore transcribed as
A minor, is the Hypolydian, the Phrygian octave
species is said to span ‘functional lichanos hypaton
to functional paranet e diezeugmenon’, and Seikilos’
song (transcribed only on p. 48) to move within
that octave species yet be notated in the Iastian
tonos, but we have not yet been introduced to
either note names or the thetic^dynamic distinc-
tion, nor told what these tonoi are. (The graduate
student may also be confused by a passing refer-
ence to the Phrygian mode, four lines above that
to the Phrygian octave species; Nowacki has not
yet explained that our Phrygian mode exhibits
the ancient Dorian octave species STTTSTT,
our Dorian mode the ancient Phrygian octave
species TSTTTST.)
Greater detail is given on pages 30^3, which set
forth Ptolemy’s notation-free teachings, summed
up in two tables. In the first, against a stub of
Greek note names used thetically according to
the Dorian tonos, he sets out the pitches of his
seven tonoi (which do not include the Iastian) in
Helmholtz notation with the Dorian as the A
minor scale, even as late-medieval writers had
equated the mese of musica speculativa with the A la
mi re in gravibus of musica practica. This table
(provided we forget ‘Alypius’) is easy to under-
stand. The second, on Nowacki’s own admission,
is not: the Greek thetic names still form the stub,
but the dynamic pitches of the tonoi are rendered
by modern pitch letters, so that a is no longer
the pitch two tones below middle C but the mese
of the tonos in question. The table would be
clearer if dynamic names had been used
(perhaps with Helmholtz letters in the stub),
since it is much easier to understand ‘dynamic
mese in Mixolydian is thetic paranete’ (or even
‘corresponds to d 0 ’) than ‘Mixolydian dynamic a
is paranete’.
After Ptolemy, Nowacki treats of his Latin
adaptor Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidore,
Aurelian, and the Alia musica, which show a
marked decline in comprehension (it is the Alia
musica that reassigned the mode names). The
chapter ends with a reference to an obsolete
practice of equating Hypodorian proslambano-
menos with A as opposed to the now conventional
F, but fails to mention that the latter was the nota-
tional equivalence established by Friedrich
Bellermann, along with a sonic equivalence of D
or C #.
In chapter 3 we are back with ‘Alypius’;
provided the graduate student already knows
what stationary and movable notes are, and the
ancient sense of ‘chromatic’and ‘enharmonic’ (if
not, the former pair is easier to track down in the
glossary than the latter), the exposition (explicit-
ly derived from Thomas J. Mathiesen) is as clear
as the subject allows except when we read on
page 44 that in the vocal notation the last three
letters of the Ionic alphabet, X, were set
aside ‘for the half-step below the lowest
proslambanomenos’. In fact, although there are
indeed symbols for E and its inflections, 
represents f, the Hyperphrygian proslambano-
menos, an octave above the Hypodorian; the
other two letters,  and X, represent the first
and second upward inflections of f required in
lower tonoi. (On the same page, ‘Hypodorian’
and ‘Hypophrygian’would be better exchanged.)
Part II examines mathematical foundations.
In two short chapters, Nowacki expounds the Py-
thagorean ratios and Boethius’ error in dividing
chromatic and enharmonic intervals arithmetic-
ally instead of geometrically. (Since neither of
these genera was still in use, and no one could
tune a string on either principle, his error could
pass undetected more easily than that of
counting the B^f tritone with the perfect fifths,
which was observed by Hermannus Contractus;
the correct calculations were made by Faber
Stapulensis.) Another short chapter presents
Aristoxenus’ assertion that the ear could not tell
the difference between the fifth and the fourth
plus two semitones, which he purported to dem-
onstrate by an experiment (conceived rather as a
geometrical construction) in which from the
perfect fourth we arrive by descents and ascents
at an interval that the ear is said to perceive as a
concord, namely a perfect fifth, proving the
semitones above and below the fourth to be
equal, exactly half a tone. This works on the
piano with its equal temperament, but not on the
solo violin with Pythagorean tuning, nor indeed
140
in just intonation. Aristoxenus, of course, knew
nothing of either instrument; on the lyre, which-
ever genus we try, the tuning must be fudged and
the listener’s ear must be insensitive.
Malcolm Litchfield had already shown that
the experiment never escaped beyond the realm
of thought; Nowacki, in the next chapter, admits
as much, but supposes that Aristoxenus had
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conceived, underlying the facts of perception, a
physical reality that could not be expressed in
mathematics before the discovery of logarithms
enabled the division of the perfect fourth into
five equal semitones to be expressed numerically
as well as geometrically. Yet that assumes that
the purported facts really were facts; since we
can perfectly well hear the Pythagorean comma,
it seems hard to believe that Aristoxenus could
not.
In chapter 8 we encounter the three means,
arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic, and their
place in the teachings of Euclid, Boethius,
Glareanus, and Zarlino, but also in the physics of
music as now understood. This is the last chapter
to deal with the ancients; chapter 9 presents
Guido’s methods for dividing the monochord,
showing their simplicity and pedagogical merit.
(An illustration would have been helpful.) The
reader has already been warned in a preliminary
note that Helmholtz’s letters are displaced in the
medieval chapters by the ‘Guidonian’; like the
others these are given in italic, so that F on page
79 is an octave higher than on page 41. Roman
would have been better, perhaps with a distinct
typography, e.g. F.
Part III is concerned with the ecclesiastical
modes. Chapter 10 discusses transposition in
its medieval understanding, of transposition
between tetrachords, showing which modes are
transposed and why; examples are quoted from
chants with which the reader is supposed to be
familiar without the need of music examples.
Chapter 11 studies how the meaning of confinalis
changed in the Renaissance from ‘the note five
steps above the finalis to which entire composi-
tions could be transposed’ (p. 92) to the fifth
above the finalis. The expositions are admirably
clear, though one long music example is split
between pages, with text intervening at the foot
of the first and the confinalis only on the second,
and no example is given for ‘Terribilis est locus
iste’; but in chapter 12, which steps back in time to
the first Quidam of the Alia musica and his unusual
manner of exposition, despite the great number
of chants cited there are no music examples at all.
However, Nowacki’s overall interpretation of the
text is as a pioneering attempt to analyse music
and not just describe it.
 Chapter13 presents a translation of the Prologus
in tonarium by Abbot Bern of Reichenau, which
will be valuable for those who do not know Latin,
a few slips notwithstanding (on p. 134 nihilominus
amplior is not ‘no less wide’ but ‘none the less
wider’, i.e. even wider). The useful notes might
have been added to: at page 140, ‘through its
diastema, or system, that is, its cola and commata’,
though a perfectly correct translation, is no less
puzzling if one understands Greek. Enlighten-
ment comes only from the passage of Musica
enchiriadis cited two chapters later on page 166;
the glossary is of little help.
Bern’s pupil Hermannus Contractus is the
subject of the next chapter. Right at the outset
Nowacki corrects a mistranslation in Ellinwood
caused by reflex translation of the Latin subjunct-
ive by the modal ‘may’ (it is not the only
instance), and observes, as John Caldwell had
already done in his review, Music & Letters, 97
(2016 ), 498, that dextrorsum and sinistrorsum denote
direction not location; but his main objective is
to vindicate Hermannus (like Aristoxenus before
him) as a thinker ahead of his time, with in par-
ticular an insight into Tonpsychologie, denied him
by Hans Oesch, that he lacked the language to
express. The final chapter demonstrates the
prevalence of empirical elements in the modal
theories of Musica enchiriadis, Alia musica, and
‘John of Afflighem’, following which a glossary
explains some of the terms that the student may
not recognize, together with others not used in
the book, such as diabolus in musica; but if on page
154 one does not remember media from page 101,
it is to the index that one must turn.
Despite some criticisms, this is a book to be
warmly recommended, not only to graduate
students.
LEOFRANC HOLFORD-STREVENS
Oxford
doi:10.1093/ml/gcab009
ß The Author(s) (2021). Published by Oxford University
Press. All rights reserved.
Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-
Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice. By Jane D.
Hatter. Pp. xvii þ 281. Music in Context.
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and
NewYork, 2019. ISBN 978-1-108-47491-7, »75.)
Collective identity in the late medieval and Early
Modern eras was regularly expressed in a
number of ways, such as heraldic arms and royal
seals, fashion, flags and banners, shields and
armour, architecture and domestic decoration,
or book bindings. Beyond the practices of civic,
courtly, and ecclesiastical institutions, self-
141
governing groups like guilds and communes
established for themselves symbols and traditions
that were self-referential, marking the traits of
membership in that community. Given the
varied nature of employment and social status of
musicians working in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, defining the shared social
group identities of musicians during this period
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is more challenging. Jane Hatter’s Composing Com-
munity in Late Medieval Music probes a number of
musical works composed by these musicians for
such evidence.
Guided by signals of self-reference found in the
texts and in the music itself, Hatter revels in the
details disclosed about the musicians’earthly and
spiritual lives, their working conditions, and
their habits of teaching and learning music.
From these textual and musical references, she
argues that we can learn directly from musicians
not only about their individual biographies, but
also about their shared agency or identity as
musicians, gaining deeper insights into their pro-
fession and craft as makers and composers of
music around 1500. Living in a period known for
increasingly conscious self-fashioning, notably
by patrons of art and music, and a rise in
ascriptions of works to composers, these
musicians, Hatter argues, were inspired in part
by the growing commodification of music
spurred on by the printing of polyphonic music
and by the emerging status of the composer as
distinct from that of the performer.
The period under consideration here is 1450^
1530, but occasionally extends earlier into the
fourteenth century and later towards 1600, and
the geographical focus is predominantly
northern Europe and Italy, supplemented by a
few examples from England and Spain. Hatter
establishes three categories of reflexive musical
works from the period for her study: first, nearly
100 motets or songs that directly refer to music or
musicians by the likes of Guillaume Du Fay,
Antoine Busnoys, Loyset Compe're, and Josquin
des Prez; second, several laments for musicians
by Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin, Pierre de la
Rue, Cipriano de Rore, and others; and third,
what Hatter names ‘Musica’ compositions, or
Masses and motets that are noteworthy for
‘displaying or are constructed around musical
features borrowed from basic elements of music
theory or pedagogy, including hexachords, sol-
mization syllables, and/or mensural structures’
(pp. 4^5). For the last group, Hatter refers to
works spanning from the middle of the fifteenth
century until the end of the sixteenth. In two
helpful appendices at the end of the volume,
Hatter arranges the vocal works fitting these
three descriptions, while the intervening