Music of ancient Greece

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The second of the two hymns to Apollo at the Athens Treasury in Delphi

Music from ancient Greece is preserved in only a few examples. One of the most important testimonies of written ancient music is the Seikilos stele . In 1588 Zarlino published the “ Mesomedes Hymns ” (an appendix to a treatise by Dionysius), in 1883 the “ Seikilos Song ” was discovered, an inscription with musical symbols on a grave stele. In 1893/94 two paiane from Delphi , carved in stone at the Athens treasure house, were made accessible to the public. After that, only a few fragments were found on papyri. We know the music of the ancient Greeks for the most part only from the writings of theoreticians of antiquity, which have been preserved in fairly large numbers. For the Greeks, music played a central role in social life. If you follow z. B. Plato , music even has an essential influence on the formation of a person's being.

In the great ritual festivals of the Greeks (the Olympic, Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian), the musical competitions (poetic and musical) played an outstanding role. The Pythian Games in particular were originally only musical in honor of Apollo at Delphi . The winner was adorned with a laurel wreath, to which the branches were brought from the valley temple in a ceremonial procession.

The older history of Greek music is so interspersed with legends and fairy tales that the historical core is difficult to identify. The invention of musical instruments and music in general is attributed to the gods (Apollon, Hermes , Athene , Pan ). Amphion and Orpheus could animate stones and conquer animals. Further mythical figures are Linos , who was killed because of his singing, and Marsyas , who was killed by Apollo out of jealousy because of his flute playing (see History of Music ).

Practical music practice in ancient Greece

The practice of making music can basically only be iconographic , i.e. H. from images, e.g. B. on vessels. Sometimes there are also literary references, such as in Homer's “ Odyssey ”. The cultural influence of Asia Minor and Egypt was significant. The practical music practice of the Greeks included singing or singing with the accompaniment of stringed instruments ( kitharody ) or wind instruments ( aulody ), as well as purely instrumental string ( kitharistics ) or flute playing ( auletics ).

The most important instruments that were almost the only instruments in question for art music were lyres such as the lyre and kithara as well as the aulos . The lyre had a curved resonance box, the kithara a flat resonance box. The number of strings in both was 7 for a long time, later it increased considerably. The magadis was possibly a stringed instrument ( harp or psalterium ) with 20 strings that was played in octaves. All of the Greek string instruments were both plucked and played with the plectrum . This was already in the 2nd millennium BC. Known as the depiction on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada (approx. 1400 BC). Rhythm instruments played only a subordinate role and were mainly used in the Dionysian cult and at the symposium . They were played mainly by women and, in the mythical area, by satyrs or Silenians . The most important rhythm instruments are the tympanum (a double-headed round frame drum ) and the krotala , hand rattles played in pairs , which resemble modern castanets in their shape and way of playing .

The aulos , always played in pairs, was a wind instrument with a single or double reed , which was built in different sizes; the syrinx ( panpipe ) was a minor instrument. The songs that the composers invented were given certain names, similar to those of the master singers; the common name was Nomos (law, sentence).

Famous was z. B. the Pythian nomos of the flute player Sakadas (585 BC), who first enforced that in the Pythian games, in addition to the kithara, the aulos was also allowed.

Terpandros , who was 50 years older than him and who is often regarded as the founder of actual musical art forms among the Greeks, made a special contribution to the kitharodic .

Other outstanding musicians are:

  • Klonas , who lived before Sakadas and after Terpandros; an inventor of important forms of the aulody;
  • Archilochus (around 650 BC), who, instead of the previously common dactylic hexameter, naturalized more popular lyrical rhythms ( iambs );
  • the lyric poet Alkaios ,
  • the poetess Sappho

overview

In a sense, Pythagoras is regarded as the "original music theorist". He was a mathematician , mystic and philosopher . Presumably inspired by the Egyptian mathematics, he found - as incorrect in the legend Pythagorean Hammers described - integer proportional relationships, which he described as the best possible sound - intervals interpreted. At least the consonance feeling of the West is based on these vibrational relationships to this day. The proportions of these 'main intervals', 1: 2: 3: 4 (octave, fifth, fourth), were also considered to be the “universal formula” of the Pythagoreans , i.e. related to all areas of life and knowledge. From Asia Minor, the Phrygia landscape , however, came an important element for the practical art of music: the wild, passionate music of the Dionysus cult native there, together with the sharp and widely sounding wind instrument, the aulos, that accompanied it. The amalgamation of this Phrygian (Dionysian) musical art with the strict native Doric music personified by Apollo took place in the Attic tragedy after it had developed into an independent art form.

According to the research z. B. Rudolf Westphals (Greek rhythm and harmony) it is not doubtful that music played a major part in the powerful effect of ancient tragedy. Not only the choirs but also the individual speeches were sung.

Greek music achieved the greatest development of its means in tragedy , which in a similar sense to modern musical drama was a union of poetry , music and the art of acting ( facial expressions , hypocritics ); the choirs were sung and many monologues were also composed. Unfortunately, no tragedy music has yet been found, so that we have no concrete idea of ​​such. However, to the extent that music, as a special art, reached ever higher levels of education, the uplifting effect it had exerted in the earlier close association with poetry had to diminish. The musical virtuosity now begins to come to the fore, the art of music strives to emancipate itself more and more from poetry. But like music, language too, around this time (5th century B.C.), was enriched by the blossoming of sophistic philosophy , which prompted it to go its own way, and music was divided of poetry .

The question of how this music was made must remain almost unanswered. The scanty fragments of ancient Greek music that were rescued from that time and discovered in the 16th century, although largely deciphered (e.g. Friedrich Bellermann ), reveal less about sound and music-making practice. The vocal music was probably closely related to the lyric ; generated her rhythm from the meter . Freedom and independence in movement are indispensable in instrumental music. This is also supported by the tonal mobility, as made possible by the three tone sexes. There was very likely no polyphony. In the lyrical part of the drama, in the choirs, the sound unfolded in octaves in the interaction of male and boy voices; Occasionally probably also by means of unrelated intervals in the accompaniment by instruments ( lyre , kithara , aulos ).

This lyric, the so-called choral, which was also cultivated as an independent branch of art and which flourished through artists such as Ibykos and Pindar (522-442), was confronted early on with melish lyric , a lyric in the true sense of the word, because the Lyra, which as an attribute of Apollo gave the genre its name, was an essential aid of the lecture.

The main difference between these two branches of lyrical art was that the former expressed the feelings of a whole in broad outlines, while the latter undertook to describe the states of the individual soul, with the musical part, the melos, being a freer and independent movement Stepping forward was permitted and required. It was in this predominance of the musical element that the real charm of melic poetry lay, after the same in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. On the west coast of Asia Minor by the Ionian and Aeolian Greeks who lived there, was trained to that perfection that we admire in the dithyrambs of Arion , the love songs of the Sappho , the drinking songs of an anacreon , a charm powerful enough to make the older, more modest kind of folk song, the art of the rhapsods , who had contented themselves with reciting the events of the heroic era and without the accompaniment of an instrument, soon to suppress. In his dialogical musical history, Plutarch dates the period of modern music from Thaletas (670), the founder of the Spartan choir dances ( gymnopedics ), and Sakadas; around this time the newer Enharmonik is said to have been introduced.

From now on the decline of Greek art becomes unstoppable; Tragedy was least able to maintain its significance as a total work of art after the union of the poet and composer in one person, as had still existed with Aeschylus and Sophocles , had been undermined by an art-historical necessity and thus made the unity of its two most important factors impossible .

Even Euripides had to leave the musical composition of his dramas to someone else, professionally educated, and intellectual calculation prevails in his poetry instead of the dithyrambic sweep of the earlier dramatists.

The loss of independence of Greece as a result of the Battle of Chaironeia (338 BC) completed the work of destruction and ended an artistic epoch which, despite its short duration of only a century and a half, has not been reached by any later.

The centuries that followed would be described as musically sterile if science had not acted in place of the deceased artistic spirit in order to theoretically consolidate the practical gain of the previous creative period. While a Plato or an Aristotle make the essence of music, its ethical and aesthetic meaning the subject of their research, the theory finds its main representative in Aristoxenus of Taranto (around 350 BC), a student of Aristotle, who on the basis of the Research carried out two centuries earlier by Pythagoras brought the mathematical, physical and acoustic side of music to a conclusion that was appropriate to the time.

An important distinguishing feature between ancient Greek and modern music is its melodic diversity, as it emerges with the different tones and shades. The former, of which there were three, the diatonic , chromatic and enharmonic, meant the modifications of the intervals within a tetrachord, in the case of the enharmonic gender down to the interval of the quarter tone, while the shading (chroma) denotes even finer differences in intonation.

Whether these were used in practical music or can only be regarded as the results of calculating speculation is still a matter of dispute; However, the fact that the church father Clemens of Alexandria (died around 220) forbade his congregation to use the chromatic tone sequences as detrimental to the dignity of worship speaks for the correctness of the first assumption .

The music of Byzantium

The church music of the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire in particular represents a crucial link between the music of antiquity and medieval music history. It has decisively shaped church music in Eastern European countries and continues to live today in a different form in Greek church music.

See also

literature

  • Helmut Brand: Greek musicians in cult. From the early days to the beginning of the late classical period (= Würzburg language and culture studies. 3). Röll, Dettelbach 2000, ISBN 3-89754-153-X (also: Würzburg, University, dissertation, 1998).
  • Oliver Busch: Logos syntheseos. The Euclidean Sectio Canonis, Aristoxenos, and the role of mathematics in ancient music theory (= publications of the State Institute for Music Research. 10). State Institute for Music Research Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-922378-17-X .
  • Thrasybulos Georgiades : Music and Rhythm among the Greeks. On the origin of occidental music (= Rowohlt's German Encyclopedia. 61, ZDB -ID 985674-2 ). Rowohlt, Hamburg 1958.
  • Katherina Glau: recitation of Greek choral poetry. The Parodoi from Aeschylus 'Agamemnon and Euripides' Bakchen as a sound sample on CD with text and accompanying booklet (= Library of Classical Classical Studies . Series 2, 101). Winter, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 3-8253-0753-0 .
  • Annemarie Jeanette Neubecker : Ancient Greek Music. An introduction. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1977, ISBN 3-534-04497-5 .
  • Albrecht Riethmüller , Frieder Zaminer (ed.): The music of antiquity (= New Handbook of Musicology. Vol. 1). Laaber-Verlag, Laaber 1989, ISBN 3-89007-031-0 .
  • Curt Sachs : The Music of the Old World in East and West. Advancement and Development. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1968.
  • Bernhold Schmid: Antiquity. In: Karl H. Wörner: History of Music. A study and reference book. 8th edition, revised. Edited by Lenz Meierott . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1993, ISBN 3-525-27812-8 , pp. 12-30.
  • Karl Schnürl : 2000 years of European music fonts. An introduction to notation studies. Holzhausen, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-85493-028-3 .
  • Martin L. West : Ancient Greek Music. Clarendon Press, Oxford et al. a. 1992, ISBN 0-19-814897-6 (Google Books online ).

Web links