Microtones : The Lost Notes of Western Music - History of Music

dollarstore sumerian looking man talks about In my previous video about the basics of Ancient Greco-Roman music, I touched upon the Enharmonic genus, the variety of modes that utilised microtonality; pitches not found in the West’s music today. Here I expand on that subject by explaining what microtonality is, why it doesn’t exist anymore in today’s Western music, and how it illustrates the fundamentally different path that Western musical development undertook from its initial Ancient Greek roots, and ultimately differentiated it from the traditions to the east. For examples of Ancient Greek microtonal modes, use this video and jump to the chapters with the “enharmonic“ title attached to them: For examples of microtonal music I’ve made, you can check out The Achaemenids, In Numa’s Time, Asbaran, as well as most of my Iranian pieces, where the description will specify if the mode is microtonal or not. Sources: • Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History, Steven Hagel • Ancient Greek Music, Martin L. West • Microtonality in Ancient Greek Music, Michael Hewitt • Hearing Greek Microtones, John Curtis Franklin: • The Sound of Medieval Song, Timothy J. McGee • Medieval Byzantine Chant and the Sound of Orthodoxy, Alexander Lingas: