''New Testament'' Times

In New Testament times, the particular Greek and also Roman alphabets have been in use, but higher mathematics still were unavailable until the discovery of Arabic numerals.

The actual crudest form of musical notation needed to wait around to develop another thousand years after New Testament times, resulting in 1600 years, to refine it to contemporary understanding.

So how can we discover songs of these times? Merely by referrals to that ancient materials and also to the effective oralverbal custom by itself, and also organology, and archaeology, as well as the mixed skills of specialist paelaeography and ethnomusicology.

We have been especially indebted on the huge scholarship of Jewish musicologist Abraham Idelsohn, working in the first years of the 20th century to create his monumental Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Songs.

Idelsohns's researches in Jewish neighborhoods throughout the world, and especially the Babylonian Jews, offered him recurring motives as well as progressions that have been not really apparent in almost any other national nor ethnic music, suggesting a common origin with regard to these melodies within Israel/Palestine of the first century CE before the destruction of the Second Temple.

Figure 1: Silver lyre

These types of musical pieces fell in to three tonal centres: Dorian, Phrygian and Lydian modes of the old Greeks (by itself suggesting a standard ear in the region).

Church music for millenia was based about these types of modes, and grew to become called the Ecclesiastical Modes - virtually all named after numerous Greek tribes. Dorian (D-d), Phrygian (E-e ), Lydian (F-f), Mixolydian (G-g), Aeolian (A-a), Ionian (C-c) - (note B-b is actually missing- a dropped Locrian mode).

They are distant from your modern day Major/minor modes. But because these are oriental melodies, there are also microtones, quartertones, that is usually, in between each note of those modes. The octave consists of twenty-four quartertones, not necessarily twelve semitones as we all are used to.