Critical and Historical Essays - Edward MacDowell (most important books to read txt) 📗

could be heard eight miles away.


VI

THE MUSIC OF GREECE


The first name of significance in Greek music is that of Homer. The hexameters of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" were quite probably chanted, but the four-stringed lyre which we associate with the ancient Greek singers was only used for a few preluding notes-possibly to pitch the voice of the bard-and not during the chant itself. For whatever melody this chant possessed, it depended entirely upon the raising and lowering of the voice according to the accent of the words and the dramatic feeling of the narrative. For its rhythm it depended upon that of the hexameter, which consists of a line of six dactyls and spondees, the line always ending with a spondee. Really the line should end with a dactyl ([- ' ']) and a spondee ([- -]). If a line ends with two spondees it is a spondaic hexameter.

From this it would seem that while the pitch of the chant would be very difficult to gauge, owing to the diversity of opinion as to how to measure in actual sounds the effect of emotions upon the human voice, at least the rhythm of the chants would be well defined, owing to the hexameter in which the latter were written. Here again, however, we are cast adrift by theory, for in practice nothing could be more misleading than such a deduction. For instance, the following lines from Longfellow's "Evangeline" are both in this metre, although the rhythm of one differs greatly from that of the other.

Wearing her Norman cap, and her kirtle of blue, and the earrings

and

Shielding the house from storms, on the north were the barns
and the farm-yard.

Now if we think that these lines can be sung to the same musical rhythm we are very far from the truth, although both are hexameters, namely,

[- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -]

[- ' ' - ' - ' ' - ' ' - ' ' - -]

dactyls, ending with spondee.

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 aesthetic culture that formed part of the education of youth; in the same general way a poet was called a singer, and even in Roman times we find Terence, in his "Phormio," alluding to poets as musicians. That Aeschylus and Sophocles were not musicians, as we understand the term, is very evident in spite of the controversies on the subject.

Impassioned speech, then, was all that existed of vocal music, and as such was in every way merely the audible expression of poetry. I have no doubt that this is the explanation of the statement that Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote what has been termed the music to their tragedies. What they really did was to teach the chorus the proper declamation and stage action. It is well known that at the Dionysian Festival it was to the poet as "chorus master" that the prize was awarded, so entirely were the arts identified one with the other. That declamation may often reach the power of music, it is hardly necessary to say. Among modern poets, let any one, for instance, look at Tennyson's "Passing of Arthur" for an example of this kind of music; the mere sound of the words completes the picture. For instance, when Arthur is dying and gives his sword, Excalibur, to Sir Bedivere with the command to throw it into the mere, the latter twice fails to do so, and returns to Arthur telling him that all he saw was

"The water lapping on the crag
And the long ripple washing in the reeds."

But when at last he throws it, the magic sword

"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 arméd 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 Alcinoüs 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