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    Unfortunately, Pythagoras left us another legacy which we've been stuck with to this day.  Instead of demystifying music so that anyone could understand it, he set up an academy which only allowed entrance to members who knew the secret password.  Only those who could sing a special sequence of notes and who had a mystical pentagram tattooed on their hand could get in the door.  Students had to be initiated into the deeper levels of the "muses and mysteries."  Hence, Pythagoras perpetuated the practice of keeping knowledge only for an exclusive, elite, inner circle. 


    From Pythagoras' time until around the 11th century, music was not written down.   Music did not remain just in the province of academics like Pythagoras, but eventually the church picked up this knowledge and used music to draw people into the church.  Most people at this time, except for the scribes and the clergy, could not read or write.  If you wanted to be a musician or sing in the chorus you then had to become a monk or a nun.  As music and singing progressed, people wanted more than the original five notes of Pythagoras, so six and seven note scales began to develop.  But there was no scientific basis for the creation of these new notes, so every monastery and every church in every region developed its own mode or scale until a plethora of scales and modes were in existence.  These modes were passed on from generation to generation in an oral tradition.  People had to learn to sing and memorize the proprietary modes and chants for their particular church.  The requirement of memorizing again favored those with perfect pitch.  This process of learning by rote and memorization was so inbred in the church that when male children with perfect pitch came along, the church often had them castrated so that they could sing soprano in the boys choir for the rest of their lives.  This was one of the few disadvantages of having perfect pitch at that time.


    From 500 BC until about the time of Christ, most of the instruments that had been developed were lyres and harps, fixed-string instruments which were plucked.  The tunings of these instruments were so varied that they couldn't play together without making a horrible sound.  From the time of Christ to the 4th century, people used gourds and wood to make guitar-type instruments known as uds and lutes.  The early ancestors of the violin and zither were developed using bowed strings or hammered strings.  In fact, some form of most stringed instruments, woodwinds, and horns in use today had been developed by around 400 AD.