enneachord

English

Etymology

ennea- +‎ chord

Noun

enneachord (plural enneachords)

1. An ancient Greek nine-stringed musical instrument.
   • 1854, The Deipnosophists; Or, Banquet of the Learned, of Athenaeus:

     But Aristoxenus calls the following foreign instruments — phœnices, and pectides, and magadides, and sambucæ, and triangles, and clepsiambi, and scindapsi, and the instrument called the enneachord or nine-stringed instrument.

   • 2007, Richard Dumbrill, Earliest Evidence of Heptatonism, →ISBN, page 11:

     The heptatonic system above must be radically segregated from an older model described in UET VII, 74, where the generative paradigm comes from an instrument fitted with nine strings, the enneachord, exposing the theory of a nine note system that is called enneatonism.

   • 2009, Roy Eriksen, Magne Malmanger, Imitation, Representation and Printing in the Italian Renaissance, page 201:

     So Apollo's instrument, a sixteenth-century lira da braccio with nine strings like the Greek enneachord given over to the nine muses, serves as the culmination of the lyre's development, as pictured in the Parnassus by Raphael.

2. A musical interval of nine notes.
   • 1980, Belgisch tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, page 37:

     For while we are used to simply dividing modes internally in terms of fifths and fourths to make an octave, Jacques complicates matters for us by introducing concepts from the monochord in Liber V, thus enneachords and decachords, i.e ranges of nine and ten notes.

   • 1983, F. Joseph Smith, Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, page 85:

     The sixth tone forms an enneachord (C-d) and does not contain a diapente under its proper ending, but rather (again) a semitritone.

   • 2008, Jack Moser Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, Charles J. Smith, Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations, →ISBN, page 103:

     These dynamical systems "pluck" the seventh chords out of the all-combinatorial enneachord in sc 9-12 (9 through 12).

3. A chord played with nine notes.
   • 1977, S. K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe:

     He thinks of the creation as a grand symphony (see also figure 13), a notion we shall find diagrammed in figures 79-83; and here he explicates the universal harmony as ten "enneachords" — that is, a chord of nine notes.

   • 2005, Richard J. Dumbrill, The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East, →ISBN, page 103:

     If we agree that the system consisted of 2 consecutive descending heptachords, or two conjunct enneachords, then we have theory applied to a specific instrument rather than pure theory.

   • 2014, Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Yossi Maurey, Edwin Seroussi, Music in Antiquity: The Near East and the Mediterranean, →ISBN:

     It should be noted that R. Dumbrill believes that, in view of the fact that there are nine strings, we should refer to this set of nine strings/notes as an “enneachord” (or as an “enneatonic” system, like “pentatonic” or “heptatonic”).

4. A mystical chord or combination of nine entities that characterizes the music of the spheres.
   • 1977, S. K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe:

     For example, under God in the mundus archetypus, we have nine orders of angels; under coelum empireum, we have the sphere of fixed stars and the seven planetary spheres (each indicated by a symbol and by the note it plays in the music of the spheres), with earth making up the ninth item in the enneachord and "playing the lowest note among the elements" (terra cum elementis proslambanomenos);

   • 1987, Joscelyn Godwin, Music, mysticism and magic: a sourcebook, page 160:

     Nature thus arranges the various enneachords in the world so that all are in tune with the celestial enneachord; and when one is set going, all the rest will resonate.

   • 1988, John Edward Fletcher, Athanasius Kircher und seine Beziehungen zum gelerhten Europa seiner Zeit, page 18:

     As the notes attributed to them go together, so the things themselves make harmonious or inharmonious "chords", and as one sounds a certain note in one enneachord, all the other entities tuned to that note or its octave vibrate sympathetically.

   • 1994, Elizabeth Ann Boults, Landscape of Chance, page 14:

     Kircher's Musarithmetic Ark (“musurgia universalis") and the "Enneachord of Nature" attempted to explain the phenomenal world in magical-musical terms: each string defined relationships among minerals, stones, plants, trees, birds, colors, etc.