Greek Musicians

Music lesson. Attic red-figure, 480-470 BC.

A song for every occasion

• Prosodion: processional song

• Peana: (choral and solo song), addressed most often to Apollo, (private, festivals, war, prayer for deliveralce to danger

• Dythiramb: choral song, in the City Dionisia each chorus was fiffty strong, dancing in circular formation, every year a thousand citizens preformed dithiramb

• Hymeneum: wedding procession, young male dancers, drinking in the streets, a riot of incense, matron ululate

• After the newly-weds had gone in for the night, the singing continued ouside the closed door!

• Funerals: mourners wailing and tearing their hair and garments, laments were sung by trained threnodist

• Symposium: hymn to the gods, political comments, reflections on the joys of wine or the pains of love, moral advices, humorous abuse

• Worksongs: carring the basket of grapes, building works, on board ship the music helped to keep the rowers in time, marching into battle

• Childsongs: singing connected to the ball games

• Songs for the atletic games and for the victories

Education in athens

• In Athens: education with teacher of letter, physical trainer and ”lyre-man”

• ”he doesn’t know to play the lyre” was equivalent to say ”he hasn’t had a good education.

• Socrates was taking lessons in the lyre at an advanced age

Professionals

• Homeric singer, rhapsodus

• citharodes and auletes (festivals)

• Poet-composers (Pindar, Simonides), created songs for a fee for patrons

• Musitian for routine service

• Eterae

• Slaves, often of foreing origins

Choral training was institutionalized

• In Crete boys were drafted into herds and subjected to a disciplined regimen directed towards making them harly men: they learned dences in armour and the singing of pean

• In Sparta the girls were under the guidance of a chourus-master and taught to revere her and obey her

Genealogies

• The relation teacher-pupil was similar to a blood relationship (father-son).

• The corporation of the musicians was a kind of family.

• The Spartan musicians were descendants of some families.

• There was a mythical genealogy of musicians

Genealogies

• the origin of singing to the aulos was ascribed, through Hyagnis and Marsyas, to Olympus and then Hierax;

• singing to accompaniment of the kithara was ascribed to Thaletas, Terpander and Archilochus

HERODOTUS (Hdt.)

• VI.60: Moreover the Lacedaemonians are like the Egyptians, in that their heralds and flute-players (auletai) and cooks inherit the craft from their fathers, a flute-player's son (auletes) being a flute-player, and a cook's son a cook, and a herald's son a herald (auletes te auleteo ginetai kai mageiros mageirou kai keryx kerykos), no others usurp their places, making themselves heralds by loudness of voice; they play their craft by right of birth.

Gift of the memory

• This theme is based on the concept of memory as a gift, which is inherited and passed down along the branches of genealogies - starting from a Muse, the mother, and Apollo, the divine father - to the son or pupil, singer and link in the chain of knowledge; memory is a gift transmitted by the gods to men

Conservative Music

• The music was conservative.

• We can talk about a mythology of the musical reminiscence.

• The role of music was conserving, transmitting and repeating sounds and myths.

• the musician was able to combine sound and images

through the use of his voice, gestures, dance, and instruments; when the musician organized a chorus, he also ruled all aspects of the accompaniment on the aulos or kithara, in addition to coordinating words, music and movements

• In this context mousike was verbally described as the necessary techne to combine text, music and movement, though the process of selection among linguistic-thematic and rhythmic-musical options

Plato

• Liked lyres with few strings

• Mathematics and order of cosmos

• In the Laws he accept aulos as a traditional instrument

• In the Republic he condemn the polyharmonic bombyx and the virtuosos

Aristotle

• Exclude the aulòs from the educational training of young men

• Isn’t possible to talk and sing

• Phrigian mode and aulos makes people enthusiastic (entranced), is cathartic

• Dorian mode and lyre: ethical, moral character