Inadequacy of our Theory. To whoever may desire to understand the music of ancient Greece, I would recommend that he put away from his mind that sense of superiority which our progress in counterpoint, harmony, form and orchestration has engendered, and devote his attention to the shortcomings of our music, for they relate to those very matters concerning which Greek music has the most to teach us.Our music has come down to us from remote ages through the Greek system. The first stage in its progress was marked by the collection of a multiplicity of Harmonies and modes, not unlike those upon which the classical music of India is based. Of the diatonic scales, some were soft, employing septimal or soft intervals, and others were hard, employing semitones, and major and minor tones, differing among themselves in the order in which these intervals were strung together. The Greeks may have added to this collection. Their chief contributions to musical progress, however, were instrumental heterophony and the science of intervals. They were driven to the use of the former by the tyranny of the ‘metrici’. Thus the long and short of Greek poetry led indirectly to the harmonic system of music, which is one of the main achievements of European civilisation. The foundations of musical science were laid by Pythagoras. The results of his labours were soon apparent in the classification of the enormous number of scales in use, the adoption of a musical notation based upon an intricate system of correlated keys, and the art of modulation. In the break-up of Roman and Greek civilisation, the subtle distinctions between the various Harmonies were the first features of the music to go under. Curiously enough, the innovations introduced by the master minds of Greece survived in the art of modulation, and the contrapuntal tradition. A new series of keys was invented. This degenerated, under the growing influence of keyed instruments, and the craze for unlimited modulation, into the musical freak of equal temperament, in which a scale, grotesquely out of focus, is set up as a standard and basis of theory. Players on the pianoforte and organ perform tempered music in tempered tones to admiring audiences.