Enharmonic scale

Despite the music of India and the Middle East still using similar intervals in traditional and classical scales, even the idea of the very small pitch intervals used in the enharmonic scale has lain outside the competence of musicians trained in occidental music at least since the time of the early Roman Empire.

Since an enharmonic scale uses (approximately) quarter tones, or more technically dieses (divisions) which do not occur on standard modern keyboards,[2] nor were even used in the preceding western tuning systems, such as ¼ comma temperament (the predominant tuning about 200 years ago) or well temperament (finally went out of use as conventional tuning about 140~150 years ago) the pitches and intervals in the several ancient Greek enharmonic scales are foreign to nearly any modern-trained musician, and generally outside the scope of musical competence of modern occidental musicians: People playing modern fixed-pitch instruments have no opportunity to experiment with musical scales containing these notes, since piano keyboards only have provisions for half tones, as do frets on guitars and mandolins, fingering holes on woodwinds, and valves on brass instruments.

Even among Hellenic musicians, enharmonic scales appear to have gone out of style around 2500 years ago, and only persisted as a perfunctory part of normal musical training; enharmonic scales seem to have been oddities even to the Greek writers in the Roman Empire, whose works on music theory we still have.

Even well-educated musicologists have little or no understanding of ancient Greek musical scales (among whom sits Elson[3]) nor even relatively recently disused tuning systems, such as the ¼ comma meantone temperament predominantly used up to the time of Bach, and the later unequal well temperaments based on it.

The enharmonic scale was a very real tuning system that survived from pre-classical Greek music (when it seems to have been put to more use[4]) into the Roman Imperial era.

Although still taught as a perfunctory part of Hellenistic education, the enharmonic scale was only rarely – if ever – used during the period of 180~400 CE when the Greek musical theory books which still survive were written.

When expressing notes with modern letter notation, it is conventional to use some elaborately sharpened or flattened version of the notes D, E, A, and B, representing not their precise pitches, but merely to follow the modern standard of giving every distinct pitch in a scale its own, separate letter.

As opposed to ancient Greek enharmonic scales, which only employed seven notes in an octave, modern musicians have expanded the idea of an "enharmonic scale" to include most of the pitches which ancient Greek tuning might select from to create a seven pitch octave.

This gives the modern musician options for in-effect modulating between multiple different ancient Greek scales.