"Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn.
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur."
Again, when Sir Bedivere, carrying the dying king, stumbles
up over the icy rocks to the shore, his armour clashing
and clanking, the verse uses all the clangour of cr--ck, the
slipping s's too, and the vowel _a_ is used in all its changes;
when the shore is finally reached, the verse suddenly turns
into smoothness, the long _o_'s giving the same feeling of
breadth and calm that modern music would attempt if it treated
the same subject.
Here are the lines:
Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare, black cliff clang'd round him as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake
And the long glories of the winter moon.
When we think of the earlier Greek plays, we must imagine
the music of the words themselves, the cadenced voices of
the protagonist or solitary performer, and the chorus, the
latter keeping up a rhythmic motion with the words. This,
I am convinced, was the extent of Greek music, so far as that
which was ascribed to the older poets is concerned.
Instrumental music was another thing, and although we possess
no authentic examples of it, we know what its scales consisted
of and what instruments were in use. It would be interesting
to pass in review the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles,
the odes of Sappho and Pindar, those of the latter having a
novel periodicity of form which gives force to the suggestion
that these choric dances were the forerunners of our modern
instrumental forms.
Such matters, however, take us from our actual subject, and we
will therefore turn to Pythagoras, at Crotona, in Italy (about
500 B.C.), whom we find already laying down the rules forming
a mathematical and scientific basis for the Greek musical scale.
More than three centuries had passed since Homer had chanted
his "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and in the course of the succeeding
fifty years some of the master spirits of the world were to
appear. When we think of Pythagoras, Gautama, Buddha, Confucius,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Pindar, Phidias, and Herodotus as
contemporaries--and this list might be vastly extended--it seems
as if some strange wave of ideality had poured over mankind.
In Greece, however, Pythagoras's theory of metempsychosis
(doctrine of the supposed transmigration of the soul from
one body to another) was not strong enough to make permanent
headway, and his scientific theories unhappily turned music
from its natural course into the workshop of science, from
which Aristoxenus in vain attempted to rescue it.
At that time Homer's hexameter had begun to experience many
changes, and from the art of rhythm developed that of rhyme and
form. The old lyre, from having four strings, was developed by
Terpander, victor in the first musical contest at the feast
of Apollo Carneius, into an instrument of seven strings, to
which Pythagoras[05] added an eighth, Theophrastus a ninth,
and so on until the number of eighteen was reached.
Flute and lyre playing had attained a high state of excellence,
for we hear that Lasus, the teacher of the poet Pindar
(himself the son of a Theban flute player), introduced into
lyre playing the runs and light passages which, until that time,
it had been thought possible to produce only on the flute.
The dance also had undergone a wonderful development
rhythmically; for even in Homer's time we read in "The Odyssey"
of the court of Alcinoues at Phocaea, how two princes danced
before Ulysses and played with a scarlet ball, one throwing
it high in the air, the other always catching it with his
feet off the ground; and then changing, they flung the ball
from one to the other with such rapidity that it made the
onlookers dizzy. During the play, Demidocus chanted a song,
and accompanied the dance with his lyre, the players never
losing a step. As Aristides (died 468 B.C.), speaking of
Greek music many centuries later said: "Metre is not a thing
which concerns the ear alone, for in the dance it is to be
_seen_." Even a statue was said to have silent rhythm, and
pictures were spoken of as being musical or unmusical.
Already in Homer's time, the Cretans had six varieties of
[5/4] time to which they danced:
[4 8 4 | 4 8 8 8 | 8 4 8 8 | 8 8 4 8 | 8 8 8 4 | 8 8 8 8 8]
[- ' - | - ' ' ' | ' - ' ' | ' ' - ' | ' ' ' - | ' ' ' ' ']
The first was known as the Cretic foot, being in a way the model
or type from which the others were made; but the others were
called paeons. The "Hymn to Apollo" was called a paeon or paean,
for the singers danced in Cretic rhythms as they chanted it.
There were many other dances in Greece, each having its
characteristic rhythm. For instance, the Molossian dance
consisted of three long steps, [- - -] ([3/2]); that of the
Laconians was the dactyl, [- ' '] ([4/4]), which was sometimes
reversed [' ' -] ([4/4]). In the latter form it was also the
chief dance of the Locrians, the step being called anapaest.
From Ionia came the two long and two short steps, [- - ' '],
([3/4: 4 4 8 8]), or [' ' - -] ([3/4: 8 8 4 4]), which were
called Ionic feet. The Doric steps consisted primarily of a
trochee and a spondee, [- ' - -] or [7/8] time. These values,
however, were arranged in three other different orders, namely,
[' - - - | - - ' - | - - - '] and were called the first,
second, third, or fourth epitrite, according to the positions
of the short step. The second epitrite was considered the most
distinctly Doric.
The advent of the Dionysian[06] festivals in Greece threatened
to destroy art, for those wild Bacchic dances, which are to
be traced back to that frenzied worship of Bel and Astarte
in Babylon, wild dances amenable only to the impulse of the
moment, seemed to carry everything before them. Instead of that,
however, the hymns to Bacchus, who was called in Phoenicia
the flute god, from which the characteristics of his worship
are indicated, were the germs from which tragedy and comedy
developed, and the mad bacchanalian dances were tamed into
dithyrambs. For the Corybantes, priests of the goddess Cybele,
brought from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, the darker form of this
worship; they mourned for the death of Bacchus, who was supposed
to die in winter and to come to life again in the spring. When
these mournful hymns were sung, a goat was sacrificed on the
altar; thus the origin of the word "tragedy" or "goat song"
(_tragos_, goat, and _odos_, singer). As the rite developed,
the leader of the chorus would chant the praises of Dionysus,
and sing of his adventures, to which the chorus would make
response. In time it became the custom for the leader,
or coryphaeus, to be answered by one single member of the
chorus, the latter being thus used merely for the chanting
of commentaries on the narrative. The answerer was called
"hypocrite," afterward the term for actor.
This was the material from which Aeschylus created the
first tragedy, as we understand the term. Sophocles (495-406
B.C.) followed, increasing the number of actors, as did also
Euripides (480-406 B.C.).
Comedy (_komos_, revel, and _odos_, singer) arose from the
spring and summer worship of Bacchus, when everything was a
jest and Nature smiled again.
The dithyramb (_dithyrambos_ or Bacchic step, [- ' ' -])
brought a new step to the dance and therefore a new element
into poetry, for all dances were choric, that is to say they
were sung as well as danced.
Arion was the first to attempt to bring the dithyramb into
poetry, by teaching the dancers to use a slower movement and to
observe greater regularity in their various steps. The Lydian
flute, as may be supposed, was the instrument which accompanied
the dithyramb, associated with all kinds of harsh, clashing
instruments, such as cymbals, tambourines, castanets. These
Arion tried to replace by the more dignified Grecian lyre;
but it was long before this mad dance sobered down to regular
rhythm and form. From Corinth, where Arion first laboured,
we pass to Sicyon, where the taming of the dithyramb into an
art form was accomplished by Praxilla, a poetess who added a
new charm to the lilt of this Bacchic metre, namely, rhyme.
And this newly acquired poetic wealth was in keeping with
the increasing luxury and magnificence of the cities, for
we read in Athenaeus and Diodorus that Agrigentum sent to
the Olympic games three hundred chariots, drawn by white
horses. The citizens wore garments of cloth of gold, and even
their household ornaments were of gold and silver; in their
houses they had wine cellars which contained three hundred
vats, each holding a hundred hogsheads of wine. In Sybaris
this luxury reached its height, for the Sybarites would not
allow any trade which caused a disagreeable sound, such as
that of the blacksmith, carpenter, or mason, to be carried on
in their city limits. They dressed in garments of deep purple,
tied their hair in gold threads, and the city was famed for
its incessant banqueting and merrymaking. It was such luxury
as this that Pindar found at the court of Hiero, at Syracuse,
whither Aeschylus had retired after his defeat by Sophocles
at the Dionysian Festival at Athens.
The worship of Bacchus being at its height at that time, it may
be imagined that wine formed the principal element of their
feasts. And even as the dithyramb had been pressed into the
service of poetry, so was drinking made rhythmic by music. For
even the wine was mixed with water according to musical ratios;
for instance, the paeonic or 3 to 2, [' ' ' -] = [8 8 8 4];
the iambic or 2 to 1, [- '] = [4 8]; dactylic or 2 to 2,
[- ' '] = [4. 8 8]. The master of the feast decided the ratio,
and a flute girl played a prescribed melody while the toast
to good fortune, which commenced every banquet, was being
drunk. By the time the last note had sounded, the great cup
should have gone round the table and been returned to the
master. And then they had the game of the cottabos, which
consisted of throwing the contents of a wine cup high in the
air in such a manner that the wine would fall in a solid mass
into a metal basin. The winner was the one who produced the
clearest musical sound from the basin.
We see from all this that music was considered rather
a beautiful plaything or a mere colour. By itself it was
considered effeminate; therefore the early Greeks always had the
flute player accompanied by a singer, and the voice was always
used with the lyre to prevent the latter appealing directly
to the senses. The dance was corrected in the same manner;
for when we speak of Greek dances, we always mean _choric_
dances. Perhaps the nearest approach to the effect of what
we call music was made by Aeschylus, in the last scene of his
"Persians," when Xerxes and the chorus end the play with one
continued wail of sorrow. In this instance the words take
second place, and the actual sound is depended upon for the
dramatic effect.
The rise and fall of actual instrumental music in Greece may
be placed between 500 and 400 B.C. After the close of the
Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.), when Sparta supplanted Athens as
the leader of Greece, art declined rapidly, and at the time
of Philip of Macedon (328 B.C.) may be said to have been
practically extinct. Then, in place of the dead ashes of art,
the cold fire of science arose; for we have such men as Euclid
(300 B.C.) and his school applying mathematics to musical
sounds, and a system of cold calculation to an art that had
needed all the warmth of emotional enthusiasm to keep it alive.
Thus music became a science. Had it not been for the little
weeds of folk song which managed with difficulty to survive at
the foot of this arid dust heap, and which were destined to be
transformed and finally to bloom into such lovely flowers in
our times, we might yet have been using the art to illustrate
mathematical calculations.
The teaching of Pythagoras was the first step in this
classification of sounds; and he went further than this, for
he also classified the _emotions_ affected by music. It was
therefore a natural consequence that in his teaching he should
forbid music of an emotional character as injurious. When he
came to Crotona, it was to a city that vied with Agrigentum,
Sybaris, and Tarentum in luxury; its chief magistrate wore
purple garments, a golden crown upon his head, and white
shoes on his feet. It was said of Pythagoras that he had
studied twelve years with the Magi in the temples of Babylon;
had lived among the Druids of Gaul and the Indian Brahmins; had
gone among the priests of Egypt and witnessed their most secret
temple rites. So free from care or passion was his face that
he was thought by the people to be Apollo; he was of majestic
presence, and the most beautiful man they had ever seen. So
the people accepted him as a superior being, and his influence
became supreme over science and art, as well as manners.
He gave the Greeks their first scientific analysis of sound.
The legend runs that, passing a blacksmith's shop and
hearing the different sounds of the hammering, he conceived
the idea that sounds could be measured by some such means
as weight is measured by scales, or distance by the foot
rule. By weighing the different hammers, so the story goes,
he obtained the knowledge of harmonics or overtones, namely,
the fundamental, octave, fifth, third, etc. This legend, which
is stated seriously in many histories of music, is absurd, for,
as we know, the hammers would not have vibrated. The anvils
would have given the sound, but in order to produce the octave,
fifth, etc., they would have had to be of enormous proportions.
On the other hand, the monochord, with which students in physics
are familiar, was his invention; and the first mathematical
demonstrations of the effect on musical pitch of length of
cord and tension, as well as the length of pipes and force of
breath, were his.
These mathematical divisions of the monochord, however,
eventually did more to stifle music for a full thousand years
than can easily be imagined. This division of the string
made what we call harmony impossible; for by it the major
third became a larger interval than our modern one, and the
minor third smaller. Thus thirds did not sound well together,
in fact were dissonances, the only intervals which _did_
harmonize being the fourth, fifth, and octave. This system
of mathematically dividing tones into equal parts held good
up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when Zarlino, who
died in 1590, invented the system in use at the present time,
called the _tempered scale_, which, however, did not come into
general use until one hundred years later.
Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, who lived more than a
century after Pythagoras, rejected the monochord as a means for
gauging musical sounds, believing that the ear, not mathematical
calculation, should be the judge as to which interval sounds
"perfect." But he was unable to formulate a system that
would bring the third (and naturally its inversion the sixth)
among the harmonizing intervals or consonants. Didymus (about
30 B.C.) first discovered that two different-sized whole
tones were necessary in order to make the third consonant;
and Ptolemy (120 A.D.) improved on this system somewhat. But
the new theory remained without any practical effect until
nearly the seventeenth century, when the long respected theory
of the perfection of mathematical calculation on the basis of
natural phenomena was overthrown in favour of actual effect. If
Aristoxenus had had followers able to combat the crushing
influence of Euclid and his school, music might have grown up
with the other arts. As it is, music is still in its infancy,
and has hardly left its experimental stage.
Thus Pythagoras brought order into the music as well as
into the lives of people. But whereas it ennobled the
people, it killed the music, the one vent in life through
which unbounded utterance is possible; its essence is so
interwoven with spirituality that to tear it away and fetter
it with human mathematics is to lower it to the level of mere
utilitarianism. And so it was with Greek music, which was held
subordinate to metre, to poetry, to acting, and finally became
a term of contempt. Pythagoras wished to banish the flute,
as Plato also did later, and the name of flute player was used
as a reproach. I fancy this was because the flute, on account
of its construction, could ignore the mathematical divisions
prescribed for the stringed instruments, and therefore could
indulge in purely emotional music. Besides, the flute was
the chosen instrument of the orgiastic Bacchic cult, and its
associations were those of unbridled license. To be sure, the
voice was held by no mathematical restrictions as to pitch;
but its music was held in check by the words, and its metre
by dancing feet.
Having measured the musical intervals, there still remained
the task of classifying the different manners of singing which
existed in Greece, and using all their different notes to form
a general system. For just as in different parts of Greece
there existed different dances, the steps of which were known
as Lydian, Ionian, Locrian, and Dorian feet, and so on, so the
melodies to which they were danced were known as being in the
Lydian, Ionian, Locrian, or Dorian scale or mode. In speaking
of Hindu music, I explained that what we call a mode consists
of a scale, and that one mode differs from another _only_ in
the position of the semitones in this scale. Now in ancient
Greece there were in use over fifteen different modes, each one
common to the part of the country in which it originated. At the
time of Pythagoras there were seven in general use: the Dorian,
Lydian, Aeolian or Locrian, Hypo- (or low) Lydian, Phrygian,
Hypo- (or low) Phrygian, and Mixolydian or mixed Lydian. The
invention of the latter is attributed to Sappho by Plutarch,
quoting Aristoxenus.
These modes were all invested with individual characters
by the Greeks, just as in the present day we say our major
mode is happy, the minor sad. The Dorian mode was considered
the greatest, and, according to Plato, the only one worthy of
men. It was supposed to have a dignified, martial character. The
Lydian, on the other hand, was all softness, and love songs
were written in it. The Phrygian was of a violent, ecstatic
nature, and was considered as being especially appropriate for
dithyrambs, the metre for the wild bacchanalian dances. For
instance, Aristotle tells how Philoxenus attempted to set
dithyrambic verse to the Dorian mode, and, failing, had to
return to the Phrygian. The Mixolydian, which was Sappho's mode,
was the mode for sentiment and passion. The Dorian, Phrygian,
and Lydian were the oldest modes.
Each mode or scale was composed of two sets of four notes,
called tetrachords, probably derived from the ancient form
of the lyre, which in Homer's time is known to have had four
strings.
Leaving the matter of actual pitch out of the question (for
these modes might be pitched high or low, just as our major
or minor scale may be pitched in different keys), these three
modes were constructed as follows:
Greek Dorian (E F) G A (B C) D E,
that is, semitone, tone, tone.
/
| Phrygian D (E F) G A (B C) D,
| or F[#] (G[#] A) B C[#] (D[#] E) F[#],
Asiatic | that is, tone, semitone, tone.
|
| Lydian C D (E F) G A (B C),
\ that is, tone, tone, semitone.
Thus we see that a tetrachord commencing with a half-tone and
followed by two whole tones was called a Dorian tetrachord;
one commencing with a tone, followed by a half-tone, and again
a tone, constituted a Phrygian tetrachord. The other modes
were as follows: In the Aeolian or Locrian the semitones occur
between the second and third notes, and the fifth and sixth:
[F: b, (c+ d) e (f+ g) a b]
Theraclides Ponticus identifies the Hypodorian with the Aeolian,
but says that the name "hypo-" merely denoted a likeness to
Doric, not to pitch. Aristoxenus denies the identity, and
says that the Hypodorian was a semitone below the Dorian or
Hypolydian. In the Hypophrygian, the semitones occur between
the third and fourth, and sixth and seventh degrees:
[F: c+ d+ (e+ f+) g+ (a+ b) c+']
In the Hypolydian, the semitones occur between the fourth and
fifth, and seventh and eighth: [F: e- f g (a b-) c' (d' e-')]
The Dorian (E), Phrygian (commencing on F[sharp] with the fourth
sharped), and the Lydian (A[flat] major scale) modes we have
already explained. In the Mixolydian, the semitones occur
between the first and second, and fourth and fifth degrees:
[G: (a b-) c' (d' e-') f' g' a']
According to the best evidence (in the works of Ptolemy,
"Harmonics," second book, and Aristides), these were
approximately the actual pitch of the modes as compared one
to another.
And now the difficulty was to weld all these modes together
into one scale, so that all should be represented and yet not
be complicated by what we should call accidentals. This was
accomplished in the following manner, by simple mathematical
means:
We remember that the Dorian, which was the most greatly
favoured mode in Greece, was divided into two tetrachords of
exactly the same proportions, namely, semitone, tone, tone. By
taking the lowest note of the Mixolydian, B, and forming a
Dorian tetrachord on it, B C D E were acquired. Adding to this
another Dorian tetrachord, E F G A (commencing on the last note
of the first), and repeating the same series of tetrachords
an octave higher, we have in all four Dorian tetrachords,
two of which overlap the others. The two middle tetrachords,
constituting the original Dorian mode, were called _disjunct_,
the two outer ones which overlap the middle ones were called
_conjunct_ or _synemmenon_ tetrachords.
If we consider this new scale from octave to octave, commencing
with the lowest note, that is to say from B to B, we find that
it coincides exactly with the Mixolydian mode; therefore this
was called the Mixolydian octave. The octave in this scale
from the second note, C to C, coincides exactly with the Lydian
mode, and was called the Lydian octave; from the third note, D,
up to its octave gives the Phrygian; from the fourth note, E,
the Dorian; from the fifth, F, the Hypolydian; from the sixth,
G, the Hypophrygian; and from the seventh, A, the Aeolian
or Hypodorian octave. Add one note to the lower end of this
universal Greek scale, as it was called, and we see that the
whole tonal system was included within two octaves. To each of
the notes comprising it was given a name partly derived from
its position in the tetrachords, and partly from the fingering
employed in lyre playing, as shown in the diagram on page 87.
The fifteen strings of the _kithara_ were tuned according to
this scale, and the A, recurring three times in it, acquired
something of the importance of a tonic or key note. As yet,
however, this scale allowed of no transposition of a mode to
another pitch; in order to accomplish this the second tetrachord
was used as the first of another similar system. Thus,
considering the second tetrachord, E F G A, as first of the
new scale, it would be followed by A B[flat] C D, and the
two disjunct tetrachords would be formed. Followed by the two
upper conjunct tetrachords, and the _proslambanomenos_ added,
our system on a new pitch would be complete. This procedure
has come down almost unchanged to our times; for we have but
two modes, major and minor, which are used on every pitch,
constituting various keys. These Greek modes are the basis
on which all our modern ideas of tonality rest; for our major
mode is simply the Greek Lydian, and our minor mode the Aeolian.