mixolydian

[Daniel Wolf]

It's irrelevant whether Greeks thought of their scales as ascending or
descending. The relevant problem is that, thanks to a medieval error
(Boethius), the interval sequences in the modes were interpreted in the
opposite direction. Thus the medieval European names represent modes whose
interval sequences are inversions of the interval sequences in the Greek
originals.

There are several hints throughout Pynchon that he took a music appreciation
or history course at Cornell. In fact, from the Webern and Rossini vs.
Beethoven discourse, I would guess that he took a course taught by the music
historian William Austin.

Daniel Wolf