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Goodnight to everyone (given the time),
for days I have been trying to understand the method of transition from Greek modes (or tones?) to Gregorian modes. I am reading everything, but it is not yet clear to me, due to my lack of knowledge of Greek. However, I have read that the shift in names (the Greek Phrygian becomes the Gregorian Dorian, etc.) is due to an error of confusion by Boethius. But what does this error consist of? Where does the shift come from?
Thanks in advance!
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Mathis, it is a very complicated issue that sometimes even experts fail to handle well. And I am no expert... if you have read a lot, then you probably already know more than me, but essentially the problem is one: the Latin medieval theorists who speak of music, such as Boethius, know nothing of the Gregorian modes contemporary to them, also because these modes in fact do not exist (that is, they do not yet have a theoretical systematization); when they speak of modes, they are speaking of Greek modes, and they only speak of them by hearsay, even here, meaning by repeating what has already been written in other treatises (Greek ones, of which sometimes we can know nothing because they often did not survive to us).
At a certain point, and here I cannot tell you much more, the changes between REAL music and theoretical systematization are, in a sense, convergent. There we begin to have a first, true theory of Gregorian modes. But I would have to go through many books and photocopies to give you more precise references...
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moreover, they are about to publish in Italian translation FINALLY Meyer's book on mode theory, Die Tonarten der klassische Vocalpolyphonie, which focuses heavily on what comes after... because, let it be clear, misunderstandings continued for the whole of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until Glareanus's Dodekachordon, where, for instance, the modes magically become 12..
