enneachord

Noun

enneachord (plural enneachords)

1. An ancient Greek nine-stringed musical instrument.
   • 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
   • 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
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...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.
   • 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
   • 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
4. A mystical chord or combination of nine entities that characterizes the music of the spheres.
   • 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...1977, S. K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe
   • 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