The gamut was the series of pitches from which all the Medieval "scales" (or modes, strictly) notionally derive, and it may be thought of as constructed in a certain way from diatonic tetrachords. Medieval theorists defined scales in terms of the Greek tetrachords. The diatonic scale notes (above) and the non-scale chromatic notes (below) These uses for the word have no relationship to the modern meaning of chromatic, but the sense survives in the current term coloratura. Similarly, in the 16th century, a form of notating secular music, especially madrigals in was referred to as "chromatic" because of its abundance of "coloured in" black notes, that is semiminims (crotchets or quarter notes) and shorter notes, as opposed to the open white notes in, commonly used for the notation of sacred music. This usage became less common in the 15th century as open white noteheads became the standard notational form for minims (half-notes) and longer notes called white mensural notation. In works of the Ars Nova from the 14th century, this was used to indicate a temporary change in metre from triple to duple, or vice versa. The details vary widely by period and place, but generally the addition of a colour (often red) to an empty or filled head of a note, or the "colouring in" of an otherwise empty head of a note, shortens the duration of the note. The term cromatico (Italian) was occasionally used in the Medieval and Renaissance periods to refer to the coloration (Latin coloratio) of certain notes. For all three tetrachords, only the middle two strings varied in their pitch. ![]() In the enharmonic tetrachord the second string of the lyre was lowered further to G, so that the two lower interval in the tetrachord were quarter tones, making the pitches A G F E (where F is F ♮ lowered by a quarter tone). In the chromatic tetrachord the second string of the lyre was lowered from G to G ♭, so that the two lower intervals in the tetrachord were semitones, making the pitches A G ♭ F E. A diatonic tetrachord comprised, in descending order, two whole tones and a semitone, such as A G F E (roughly). These three tunings were called diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, and the sequences of four notes that they produced were called tetrachords ("four strings"). In ancient Greece there were three standard tunings (known by the Latin word genus, plural genera) of a lyre. Historically, however, it had other senses, referring in Ancient Greek music theory to a particular tuning of the tetrachord, and to a rhythmic notational convention in mensural music of the 14th to 16th centuries. Ĭhromatic most often refers to structures derived from the twelve-note chromatic scale, which consists of all semitones. In some usages it includes all forms of heptatonic scale that are in common use in Western music (the major, and all forms of the minor). Very often, diatonic refers to musical elements derived from the modes and transpositions of the "white note scale" C–D–E–F–G–A–B. These terms may mean different things in different contexts. They are very often used as a pair, especially when applied to contrasting features of the common practice music of the period 1600–1900. , movement I, fugue subject: diatonic variant ĭiatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony.
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