Jubal in the Middle Ages

Mediaeval treatises on music usually begin with a series of stereotype questions and answers, very often in the following order: (1) Quid sit musica; (2) unde dicetur; (3) a quibus sit inventa. The answers amount to a more or less comprehensive inventory of the various definitions of music, its subdivisions, its effects, its etymology, and its inventors. 

Two figures have claimed the right of being the first inventors of music. Pythagoras, the first to have defined sound and sound relations in numerical proportions, represents the classical view on the beginnings of musical science. Jubal, 'the father of them that play upon the harp and the organ,' steps out of ancient, antediluvial times in Genesis IV together with his brother Jabel ('father of such as dwell in tents and of herdsmen'), his half-brother Tubalcain ('a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron') and a half-sister Noema, of whom the Bible, at least, says nothing.