Editing Enharmonic scale (section)

== Difference in meaning of "enharmonic" between the classical-era and now ==
The ancient Greek meaning of '''''enharmonic''''' is that the scale contains at least one very narrow interval. (The spacing of each pair notes between their bracketing fixed notes is usually either approximately or exactly the same, so when there is one narrow interval in one bracket there is almost always another one inside the other bracket.)<ref name=ML-West-1992/> 
Modern musical vocabulary has re-used the word ''"enharmonic"'' altered to have the most extreme possible meaning of its ancient sense, to mean two differently-named notes which happen to actually have the same pitch. In [[musical system of ancient Greece|ancient Greek music]] from which ''enharmonic scales'' come, the meaning of ''enharmonic'' not so extreme: It means that the notes are ''not'' actually the same, but do only differ in pitch by a very slight amount, and had a similar connotation to "[[microtonal]]" in modern musical vocabulary.

Since an enharmonic scale uses (approximately) [[quarter tones]], or more technically [[diesis|dieses]] (divisions) which do not occur on standard modern keyboards,<ref name=Callcott-1833>
{{cite book
 |first=John Wall |last=Callcott
 |year=1833
 |title=A Musical Grammar in Four Parts
 |page=109
 |publisher=James Loring
}}
</ref>
nor were even used in the preceding western tuning systems, such as [[quarter comma meantone|¼&nbsp;comma temperament]] (the predominant tuning about 200&nbsp;years ago) or [[well temperament]] (finally went out of use as conventional tuning about 140~150&nbsp;years ago) the pitches and intervals in the several ancient Greek enharmonic scales are foreign to nearly any modern-trained musician, and generally outside the scope of musical competence of modern occidental musicians: People playing modern fixed-pitch instruments have no opportunity to experiment with musical scales containing these notes, since piano keyboards only have provisions for [[half tone]]s, as do frets on [[guitar]]s and [[mandolin]]s, fingering holes on [[woodwind]]s, and valves on [[brass instrument]]s. This has been the situation for more than 150&nbsp;years for fixed-pitch occidental instruments.

Even among [[Ancient Greece|Hellenic]] musicians, enharmonic scales appear to have gone out of style around {{nobr|{{gaps|2|500}} years}} ago, and only persisted as a perfunctory part of normal musical training; enharmonic scales seem to have been oddities even to the Greek writers in the [[Roman Empire]], whose works on music theory we still have.<ref name=ML-West-1992/> So the idea of such very small pitch intervals used in the enharmonic scale has lain outside of the scope of musicians' training for occidental music, despite music of [[India]] and the [[Middle East]] still using similar intervals traditional and classical scales.