Dictionary

enneachord en · NOUN

Etymology

From ennea- + chord.

Meanings

1. An ancient Greek nine-stringed musical instrument.
   • 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. 2007, Richard Dumbrill, Earliest Evidence of Heptatonism, →ISBN, page 11:
   • 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. 1854, The Deipnosophists; Or, Banquet of the Learned, of Athenaeus:
   • 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. 2009, Roy Eriksen, Magne Malmanger, Imitation, Representation and Printing in the Italian Renaissance, page 201:
2. A musical interval of nine notes.
   • 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. […] The sixth tone forms an enneachord (C-d) and does not contain a diapente under its proper ending, but rather (again) a semitritone. 1966, F. Joseph Smith, Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum Musicae, pages 83 and 85:
   • These dynamical systems "pluck" the seventh chords out of the all-combinatorial enneachord in sc 9-12 (9 through 12). 2008, Jack Moser Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, Charles J. Smith, Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations, →ISBN, page 103:
3. A chord played with nine notes.
   • 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. 2005, Richard J. Dumbrill, The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East, →ISBN, page 103:
   • 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”). 2014, Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Yossi Maurey, Edwin Seroussi, Music in Antiquity: The Near East and the Mediterranean, →ISBN:
   • 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. 1977, S. K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe:
4. A mystical chord or combination of nine entities that characterizes the music of the spheres.
   • 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. 1994, Elizabeth Ann Boults, Landscape of Chance, page 14:
   • 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. 1988, John Edward Fletcher, Athanasius Kircher und seine Beziehungen zum gelerhten Europa seiner Zeit, page 18:
   • 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. 1987, Joscelyn Godwin, Music, mysticism and magic: a sourcebook, page 160:
   • 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); 1977, S. K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe:

Forms