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
• 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 - Symposium
• 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
Worksong - Sportsong
• Worksongs: carrying 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 athletic 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
• Musicians for routine service
• Eterae
• Slaves, often of foreign origins
Choral training was
institutionalized
• In Crete boys were drafted into herds and
subjected to a disciplined regimen directed
towards making them hardly men: they
learned dances in armor 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 fluteplayers (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