CHAPTER 1
Music in Ancient Greece
Landmarks In Greek
History And Culture
MAP OF ANCIENT GREECE
• Homer: Iliad and Odyssey (c750 B.C.E.) two great
epics of early Greece
• Sappho: ancient Greece’s greatest female lyric poet
(7th century B.C.E.)
• Pericles: dominated the politics of a city-state of more
than 300,000 individuals (Athens) between 469 an
d429 B.C.E.
• Acropolis: a hill overlooking Athens, site of temples;
construction began c450 B.C.E.
• Parthenon: temple to Athena Nike; Bringer of victory;
patron goddess of Athens
Music in Greek Society
THE PARTHENON
Poetry and Drama:
Music in the Greek Theater
• Aeschylus (c580-480 B.C.E.), Sophocles (490-407
B.C.E.), and Euripides (485-406 B.C.E.).
• Music survives from Euripides, Orestes (see
Anthology No. 1)
EURIPIDES, ORESTES, STASIMON CHORUS
SEIKILOS, EPITAPH
Greek Musical Instruments
• Lyre: a medium-sized instrument usually fitted with
seven strings of sheep gut and plucked by a
plectrum of metal or bone.
• Kirthara: a very large lyre, also with seven strings,
but with a resonator at the bottom made of of
wood rather than a tortoise shell.
• Aulos: a wind instrument fitted with a round single
reed or a flat double reed.
Music in Greek Philosophy:
The Ethical Power of Music
• Pythagoras (c580-480 B.C.E.): believed that the essence
of the universe could be found in music and number.
Review the legend of Pythagoras passing by the smithy’s
shop and hearing anvils (or hammers) of different sizes
produce the intervals of the octave, fifth, and fourth.
• Plato (429-347): Timeus presents the idea that reality
exists only in vaguely perceived background forms;
number is the reality that lurks behind the scale and the
intervals and indeed all music; the starting point of the
Platonic theory of “Music of the Spheres”
• Aristotle: (384-322): Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s
Politics present the concept of the ethical quality of
music: that music affected the way we behave and that
certain kinds of music were uplifting and morally
instructive, and other kinds led to deviant behavior.
Point for Discussion
Were the attempts of Plato and Aristotle to restrict the
kinds of music young people listen to today similar to
our own “parental advisor labels” on CDs, or the
Talaban’s total ban of secular music?
Greek Music Theory
• Greeks generated notes of scale by using basic
ratios of 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 and 9:8 (3:2-4:3=9:8)
• Put largest intervals C-C, C-G, C-F in place first and
filled remaining notes with 9:8 interval. Intervals
E-F and B-C were “left over” half steps.
• The result: a diatonic scale with five whole tones
and two (approximately) half tones within each
octave.
• Tetrachord: Four-note units, the outer notes of
which were fixed, the inner notes moveable.
• Could be strung out in succession to for Greater
Perfect System (two octave scale)
Greater Perfect System
Greeks had either musical staff, nor note heads, nor clefs; they only spoke in
terms of intervallic relationships—of intervals as they were visualized on the
Greater Perfect System
Greek Tonoi
Greek tonoi placed conceptually on the Greater Perfect
System.
– Greek genera: diatonic genus, chromatic genus and
enharmonic genus
– Chromatic genus allow for chromatic inflections;
enharmonic genus for microtonal inflection
Review Of Greek Music
• A system of consonance and dissonance (octaves,
fifths, fourths, and multiples were consonances) that
would remain unchanged until the fourteenth century
• A system recognizing octave duplication and dividing
each octave into seven pitches (five whole tones and
two semitones)
• The concept of scale patterns, each with its own
name, incorporating different intervallic sequences
• A system of tuning, called Pythagorean, that involved
mathematically exact octaves, fifths, and fourths; it
remained the only system of tuning discussed by
music theorists until the late fifteenth century
• Important musical terms such as “tetrachord,”
“diatonic,” “chromatic,” “enharmonic.”