Decachord

Apollo himself is depicted with a decachord, that is, an instrument with ten tuned strings, or ten harmonising voices, otherwise a cithara.

It is delightful to praise Jehobah, And to chant the measured lay to Thy name, O Most High; To proclaim Thy mercy in the morning, And Thy faithfulness every night, Upon the decachord, even upon the psaltery, Upon the higgæon, together with the harp.

The first is the view taken by the Syriac and Arabic versions, which make the lute to be the decachord, and the harp the mere accompaniment to a song.

Thou City of the Lord! Whose everlasting music Is the glorious decachord!

The last presents the decachord theme in the form of a necklace of ten pieces of silver, precious and significant only when the pieces were not separated.

This decachord of 10 books about Christ's life from the Annunciation through his Ascension, culminating in the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles and the birth of the Church, was dedicated to Pope Julius II.

Zigabenus sees in this expression the four great hymns of the New Testament: he also sees in the decachord the ten songs of the Old Testament, those of Miriam, Moses, Deborah, Hannah, David, Solomon, Judith, Hezekiah, Habakkuk, the Three Children, — an adaptation rather than an explanation.

Using the logic employed by many subset-based similarity measures, the chromatic trichord apparently has twice the affinity to this decachord as it does to the chromatic pentachord, despite the fact that the trichord could be seen as the progenitor of the pentachord but not of the decachord.