enneachords

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
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
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
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