Dear JP and Simon,

> Are we sure that the Greeks took these correspondances seriously,
or is it just philosophers making abstract points that would not have
been recognised by musicians?

I think this might be similar to the sense of a major scale sounding
light and bright and a minor scale sounding more weighty and
serious. But there's more to it than that in Greek music.
Each 'harmonia' (tuning) was associated with certain melodic
characteristics or turns of musical phrase. You can imagine that
relating to the emotions even more than a mere scale.

> ... Scottish pibroch bagpipe scales? They might give some pointers,
selecting only a few notes from the diatonic range and applying them
very carefully to build up "colours".

I had a quick look at some of my own research on that but all genres -
cumha (lament), fàilte (salute), caismeachd (march), port tionail
(gathering tune), whatever - to one degree or another use scales
which transcend each genre. I haven't analysed the whole repertoire,
what a task, but I imagine that certain scales will be more linked
with one genre than another and I think this would happen naturally
anyway, whether consciously or subconsciously.

The question would be whether the surviving repertoire reflects any
period when particular scales were deliberately linked to a
particular function. Lacking clear evidence, we can't know that
scale associations in the present repertoire would be anything more
than subconscious or a musical habit that was fallen into.

Beannachdan,



Alasdair