Ancient Greek music

“ And if this can be said of Ptolemy's [Pg 110] theory, what would be the value of a similar scheme combining the modes with the Enharmonic and the different varieties of the Chromatic genus? The truth is, surely, that such a scheme tries to unite elements which belong to different times, which in fact are the fundamental ideas of different stages of art.
The most striking characteristic of Greek music, especially in its earlier periods, is the multiplicity and delicacy of the intervals into which the scale was divided. ”

“ The Voice alone is more perfect than instruments alone; but it wants one thing to complete its Perfection; and that one thing is Harmony: and Instruments alone, without a voice, yield only rambling and extravagant Sounds, which may indeed affect and move the Soul, but cannot instruct nor form the Manners which ought to be the chief end of Musick.’ [33]
Before considering the probable character and form of ancient Hellenic compositions we must record that music hardly existed among the Greeks as an independent art. The word [Greek: mousikê] held a much broader meaning than our own word music ”

“ The modern diatonic scale is fully recognised by him, but only as one of several different divisions. And the division which he treats as the ordinary or standard form of the octave is not the modern diatonic scale, but one of the so-called 'soft' or flattened varieties. It is clear that in the best periods of Greek music these refinements of melody, which modern musicians find scarcely conceivable, were far from being accidental or subordinate features. Rather, they were as much bound up with the fundamental nature of that music as complex harmony is with the music of modern Europe. ”

“ We now resume the chronological chain of musical history, from the termination of “Ancient Greek music;” for the music of the Christian church took its rise, from the melodies of Ancient Greece. Yet it is probable that the earliest Christian melodies were not according to the classical Grecian type, but rather conformed to the popular in style. This has always been the case in the rise of a new sect with sagacious leaders. The Jews on leaving Egypt, yet sang the popular melodies dear to their hearts, by association of childhood and youth ”

“ This will become clear if we bring together all the indications which we have observed of scales differing from each other in species, that is, in the order of the intervals in the octave. In doing so it will be especially important to be guided by the principle which we laid down at the outset, of arranging our materials according to chronology, and judging of each piece of evidence strictly with reference to the period to which it belongs. It is only thus that we can hope [Pg 102] to gain a conception of Greek music as the living and changing thing that we know it must have been. ”

“ Such a true conception of beauty, such perfect symmetry, and such far-reaching imagination and lofty aspiration as are present in, and have made ancient Greek art and literature luminous for all time, bespeak conditions that would have carried music to fruition during their continuance had she not been so intangible, and therefore necessarily slow in developing. ”

“ Very little is known about Greek music, but it was considered very necessary that the music taught should be of an ennobling and inspiring kind. The Lydian melodies were held to be altogether too soft and sentimental, and the Athenians preferred those known as Dorian, because they were simpler and sterner and of a kind to inspire men to noble and manly deeds. Aristotle who wrote so much about the ideal state, wrote also about the education an ideal state should give to its children. ”

“ Greek writers regard even the repetition of the melody in a strophe and antistrophe as a concession to the comparative weakness of a chorus. With the Greeks, moreover, the union in one artist of the functions of poet and musician must have tended to a more exquisite adaptation of language and music than can be expected when the work of art is the product of divided labour. ”

“ If the course of poetry and that of the manual arts have thus run independently throughout almost the whole field of history, those of music and the manual arts have been more widely separated still. In ancient Greece music and poetry were, we know, most intimately connected, but of the true nature of Greek music we know but little, of that of the earlier middle ages less still, and throughout the later middle ages and the earlier Renaissance the art remained undeveloped, whether in the service of the church or in secular and popular use, and in both cases in strict subservience to words. ”

“ Ancient Rome, which had no natural music, readily adapted Greek music, in the time of the emperors, to all the usages of public and private, as of civil and religious, life. Art remained Grecian, and most of the singers and players came from Greece to take service under the wealthy patricians. ”

“ With the Greeks, music, or the art of the Muses, originally comprised, besides the tone-art, several other arts and sciences; from which it may be conjectured that the earliest Greek musicians practised also the healing art like the mystery-men of our time. The [Pg 86] ancient Egyptians, at an early period, had attained a considerably higher stage of development in the cultivation of music than many nations of the present day have achieved. ”

“ To draw the distinction too sharply between the cultured and the uncultured strata may be a source of fallacy, especially when it is ancient Hellas that we are dealing with, where the artist was usually a man of the people and the people certainly delighted in the work of their poets, and were strangely susceptible to the healing influences of music. If Greek poetry, then, and art strove to banish the ugliest forms of the demon-world, and thereby worked with purifying and tranquillising influence on the temperament, so much the better for the Greek peasant. ”

“ Thus we see that metre in verse and rhythm in music are two different things, although of course they both had the same origin.
After all has been said, it is perhaps best to admit that, so far as Greek music is concerned, its better part certainly lay in poetry. In ancient times all poetry was sung or chanted; it was what I have called impassioned speech. The declamation of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” constituted what was really the “vocal” music of the poems. With the Greeks the word “music” (mousiké) included all the æsthetic culture that formed part of the education of youth ”

“ The earliest Greek scale had but four tones, and was probably used to accompany hymns. It might still suffice for many church chants. [19] People seldom think how much music can be manufactured from three or four notes; Rousseau 38 gave a practical illustration of it in the last century, by writing a not very monotonous tune, on three notes. But an instrument founded on so few notes might also have been used to give the pitch to the voice in reciting, or half-singing a poem. We must remember that the poems of Greece were chanted in public ”

“ We require, to be sure, almost by philological method to reconstruct for ourselves the ascendency of musical influence in order to receive something of the incomparable comfort which must be characteristic of true tragedy. Even this musical ascendency, however, would only have been felt by us as such had we been Greeks: while in the entire development of Greek music—as compared with the infinitely richer music known and familiar to us—we imagine we hear only the youthful song of the musical genius intoned with a feeling of diffidence. ”

“ The value of the find, as I view it, is that this rescued relic of an elder civilization should help to enable us to realize the actual nature of Greek art in music, and its place in Greek life—either that or nothing; the value is lost if simplicity is lost.
The melody as melody does not attract us ”

“ Perhaps it is not out of place to recall, in conclusion, how modern composers have been inspired by the stories of classic antiquity and beguiled by the music of Greek poetry. Modern music, disconnected from all that may have been the music of the older nations of antiquity, is a lineal descendant of the music of the Greeks. ”

“ The music of the Greeks has engaged the attention of many learned men, but is so difficult a subject that no one understands it; and it is as easy to imagine how the Pyramids were raised as to conceive what Greek music was like. ”

“ Here again the lyric poems of the greatest poets were taught him, and the Greek music always laid the greatest stress on the words. Aristotle and others complain that amateurs were spending too much time on the practicing of difficult music, and we know from the musical treatises preserved to us that the Greeks thought and taught a great deal more about musical theory and the laws of sound than we do. The Greek tunes preserved are not pleasing, but we know that they used the strictest and most subtle principles in tuning instruments, and understood harmony and discord as well as we do. ”

“ All our arts are thousand-nation arts, shadows and echoes of dead worlds playing upon our own. Italian music, out of its feudal kingdoms, comes to us as essentially solo music—melody; and the civilization of Greece, being a civilization of heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts, its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming of the crowd to the arts of this groping world. ”

“ There are many, perhaps even some in this audience, who would say the same thing of the plain song which the present Pope has ordered to be used in Roman Catholic churches to the exclusion of more modern music.
The real conclusion is that so far Greek music is to us unintelligible; and yet in all the other arts nothing is more intelligible to modern minds than the products of Greek taste which are our best and clearest models. Is it that a highly artistic nation may be wanting in one particular department? ”

“ Fourthly, as much of the learning of a Greek was martial and designed to fit him for defending his country, he required some knowledge of music that on the field of battle his voice might harmoniously mingle with those of his countrymen, in chaunting those stirring, impetuous, and terrible melodies, called pæans, which preceded the first shock of fight. For some, or all of these reasons, the science of music began to be cultivated among the Hellenes, at a period almost beyond the reach even of tradition. ”

“ Infinitely inferior to the moderns in the mechanical resources of the art, they had made, it appears, a far finer and closer analysis of its relation to emotional states; with the result that even in music, which we describe as the purest of the arts, congratulating ourselves on its absolute dissociation from all definite intellectual conceptions,—even here the standard of the Greeks was as much ethical as aesthetic, and the style of music was distinguished and its value appraised, not only by the pleasure to be derived from it, but also by the effect it tended to produce on character. ”

“ Their choruses were unisons, and their instrumental accompaniments were either purely rhythmic (regardless of pitch) or they followed the voice, for the Greeks had no discoverable conception of harmony. In contemplating the marvellous erudition and the poetic sense of ancient Greece, and the important rôle played by music in the period of her glory, I can but feel that the failure to chronicle her melodies is a misfortune. ”

“ We know very little of the music of the ancient Greeks, and if we sought to imitate that, it would sound so archaic and even unnatural to our modern ears as to fail in properly supporting the emotions of the drama for us. While the Greeks had developed the technic of the drama to a remarkable extent, music as an art was at that time in its infancy, although its importance was fully recognized by Plato and the great dramatists. ”

“ If it be true that Greek music produced effects of this kind, "if it needed but a few Phrygian strains to animate troops with courage in the face of the enemy, or a melody in the Dorian mode to ensure the fidelity of a wife whose husband was far away, then the loss of Greek music is a melancholy thing for generals and husbands ”

“ We must therefore turn back from practice to theory and prove to you that, in{141} spite of these difficulties, Greek music was distinctly the source and forerunner of our own. And I may say by way of preface to this part of my discourse that the simplicity of music, far from being a cause of its lesser emotional effect, may be the very reason why the great mass of people feel it more deeply. The intricacy and difficulty of our modern music tend to estrange it from the feelings of the larger public and to confine its influence to the special class of trained musicians. ”

“ Musical pipes we have traced through several phases of development, from the simplest and earliest pipe up to the ultimate stage in the many-ringed flute, as perfected in the hands of the Greek people. Beyond that it is not necessary to go, because our objective is the Greek system of music, as left to us to be the source of our own. ”

“ His works combine no less than seventeen books containing hymns, pæans, dithyrambs, parthenias, hyporchemas, encomiums, thernoi epinikia, and other forms, all intended for choral performance. His first Pythic ode is among the six fragments of Greek music preserved to us.
We must now consider what is perhaps the greatest and the most original creation of the Greek mind—the drama. Its forms we have seen in lyric poetry and in pantomimic dances of the chorus, furnishing the elements of dialogue and representative action. ”