IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
My speculations about some etymologies, far from any musicological or linguistic pretensions, are a gesture born from the sign of the capriccio and the divertimento. I can start with the valued “once upon a time” of childhood, since the course of this brief investigation implies to go back to the sources of time, where the borders between tale, myth and reality merge.
So once upon a time was the word, matter rarely used a basis for musical reflection and once upon a time there was Greek and Roman Antiquity, a huge pool of knowledge which never ceased to fascinate posterity.
First and foremost it is important to stress that the knowledge of the past is a complex system, conceived to harmonize thoughts of various fields by letting them communicate and making them receptive to one another. In this way musical exploration inevitably leads us to err in the symbolic worlds of mathematics, astronomy, physics or metaphysics; and above all medicine, a science with which music shared the cradle in their pythagorean home of pre-Christian Greece.
Twins born of a same labour, music and medicine grow from the birth of a common language, of which we still preserve traces. Medicine heartily hands over to musicians terms such as “tactus” or “temperament”.. Similarly, the grateful musician exchanges with his doctor brother the muscular 'tone' or the 'acute' stage of an illness.
Sometimes the etymologies of music reveal realities which are more enigmatic; in these cases the word seems to become the esoterical recipient of a cryptic knowledge, “reserved” and secret.
The latin term chorda/chordae[1] for instance both refers to the strings of a musical instrument and to the bowel, this gut generally used - and still is used - to make the strings.
In his Mundus Subterraneus (1682), A. Kircher explains, in accordance with the ancient Greek medical tradition, that the digestive system (stomach and bowel) corresponds to and is associated with Earth; and Earth takes shape in music by means of the bass in the counterpoint; the low range, the “dark wood” of harmony causes melancholy, an unstable and celestial temper which can indifferently set fire to the genius imagination, or, if it's not tempered by action and efficient antidotes such as wine, can lead to prostration, depression, fury and madness.
String instruments - plucked or bowed - are therefore the privileged vehicles of the whole repertory of melancholic temperament. It can be indiscriminately translated by dissonances, languid and slow movements (Zarlino) of harmonic extravagances, or even by the capricious and improvised gesture of toccate, preludes and lamenti.
To summarize, chorda refers to music, bowel to anatomy, earth to astronomy, bass to music and melancholy to psychology.
It's crystal-clear! The word is the synthesis of a development, a path conceived as a convergence from the exterior to the center, common to all energies brought in. The word is a concentrate of magical virtues and its meanings, a form of active principle, ready to react to the slightest external solicitation. Music will be its servant and the composer will have to tune his inspiration and its quill to its laws.
Roberto Festa
[1]Chorda derives from Greek and has been borrowed by the Latins. Its first etymological sense is precisely the bowel. In any case, the greek verb from which everything comes from is teino: to stretch a rope between two ends, from which also derive tendon, tenor and tonus.