four-toned

Updated: May 6, 2025

And it is readily conceivable that the accumulated agency of subsequent poet-musicians, inheriting and adding to the products of those who went before them, sufficed, in the course of the ten centuries which we know it took, to develop this four-toned recitative into a vocal music having a range of two octaves.

Herbert Spencer - Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects: Everyman's Library