rning music. Notwithstanding that Italy fell under the dominion
of the Goths and Lombards after 476, it preserved Greek traditions in
music to the end of the sixth century.

Cassiodorus, who lived still in 562, aged almost 100 years, left a
souvenir for music in the fifth chapter of his treatise on the
"Discipline of Letters and Liberal Arts" (_De Artibus ac Disciplinis
Litterarum_). He enumerates the fifteen modes of Alypius as not having
been abandoned, and establishes them in their natural order, calling
them tones. Here also we find the classification of six kinds of
symphonies, about 300 years after this enumeration, first realized in
notes by Hucbald. He gives a series of fourths and of fifths,
occasionally for two voices, occasionally with the octave added. These
are the most important of all the things concerning music to be found
in that part of Cassiodorus' book dedicated to music.

In the seventh century the first, or perhaps the only author who wrote
upon music was Bishop Isidore, of Seville. In his celebrated treatise
on the etymologies or origins ("_Isidori Hispaniensis Episcopi
Etymologiarum, Libri XX_") divided into twenty books, chapters XIV to
XXII of the third book relate to music. These are the chapters
published by the Abbe Gerbert, under the name of "_Sentences de
Musique_," in the collection of ecclesiastical writers upon this art,
after a manuscript in the imperial library at Vienna. While many of
these chapters contain nothing more than generalities and pseudo
historical anecdotes concerning the inventors of this art, this is not
the case with the nineteenth chapter, the sixth in Gerbert's edition,
for here he speaks "Of the First Division of Music, called Harmony."
The definitions given by St. Isidore have a precision, a clearness not
found in other writers of the Middle Ages. "Harmonic music," says he,
"is at the same time modulation of the voice, and concordance of many
simultaneous sounds. Symphony is the order established between
concordant sounds, low and high, produced by the voice, the breath or
by percussion. Concordant sounds, the highest and the lowest, agree in
such way that if one of them happens to dissonate it offends the ear.
The contrary is the case in diaphony, which is the union of dissonant
sounds." Here we find St. Isidore employing the term diaphony in its
original sense, as a Greek word, meaning dissonance--a sense exactly
opposite to that of Jean de Muris.

The Venerab