Macarie Ieromonahul's Musical Scales

The Theoriticon of Macarie the Hieromonk appeared in 1823. The book presented for the first time in Romanian the theory of the neo-Byzantine echoi proposed by archimandrite Chrysanthus. His model dividing the octave into 68 intervals was changed twenty years later for the one created by Anton Pann, which divided the octave into 22 intervals. The paper shows that the system presented by Macarie was a non-tempered one and it mainly used non-octaviant scales. The system is compared to the other theories, particularly to the theory of Pann in attempting to find the reason why the octave becomes divided into 22 intervals.

Costin Moisil