Eleonora Rocconi
In the Classical world, the art of mousikē (which embraced the entire field of poetic performance to which the Muses gave their name, including music, song, and dance) was, at the same time, a religious, paideutic, but overall “aesthetic” experience. The emotional effect of any musical event is in fact frequently described by Greek and Latin sources, and the “pleasure” (hēdonē) that it was able to arouse in both the performers and the audience (see Aristotle, Politics 1339b) is a pivotal element for the comprehension of the great “psychagogic” power (i.e. “leading, or persuading, souls”) attributed to music in antiquity and, consequently, of its immense educational and political value. In fact, according to Greek belief, music could influence the character (ēthos) of those who were exposed to it. Very soon ancient philosophers started to develop elaborate theoretical principles on which such a power was based, in order to explain the best possible use of music in different contexts: in scholarly literature these principles are known as “the ēthos theory of music.”1
Ancient responses, both emotional and intellectual, to music and artistic experiences may of course be discussed only after having understood the importance and diffusion of music in everyday life. Scholars nowadays widely agree that the identity of musical works depends not only on pure form, but also on aspects of the context in which the sound structure has been created (Davies 2003, 493). Hence a description of the music-historical setting in which such compositions were created and performed becomes essential to the understanding of ancient evaluations of music art works and to the assessment of their impact on individuals and society.
An overview of musical genres in Greek and Roman antiquity may be presented according to different criteria: for modern philosophy of music, an important distinction is that between instrumental and vocal music – that is, music with words – within which we should, in turn, detect also the possible presence of a dramatic setting, as in musical theater. Philosophical discussions on the potential narrative or representational contents in music have in fact to take into account the numerous occasions in which, throughout history, words have been combined with musical melodies and rhythms, thus giving an explicit representational content to musical compositions (Kivy 2002, esp. 160ff.). This fundamental distinction (vocal/instrumental) was certainly perceived to be significant by ancient people too (even if their concept of mousikē was much wider than ours), especially in theoretical contexts where the debate on the “mimetic” – that is, representative – features of mousikē was particularly heated, as in Plato’s writings (on mimēsis in antiquity and its philosophical implications, see Halliwell 2002). Therefore a survey of ancient musical genres which, though mostly relying on other systems of classification attested by ancient sources, also pays attention to such features is not unhistorical and may be rather relevant for an aesthetic approach to ancient Greek and Roman music and dance.
In recent years, Classical Studies have focused their attention on the ancient Greek world as a song culture, stressing the performative aspects of ancient literature, often overlooked in the past, and reconstructing the many different ways and contexts in which it was experienced.2 Indeed, the Greek culture of mousikē included song, poetry, and physical movement, all integrated within an all-embracing event which served to define culture, ethnicity, and gender, and was a core element of many religious and social rituals. The settings for such artistic performances ranged from entertainment in private homes to larger urban or Panhellenic festivals (lit. “involving all Greeks,” not just a single polis), where competitive performances took place in public spaces, reinforcing local individualities as well as acting as a dynamic opportunity for exchange and interaction among different parts of the Hellenic world. In these contexts, music acted as the most effective means to arouse deep emotions in the listeners and, hence, to convey and reinforce the values shared by the community involved. Musical practice was deeply implicated in how Greeks defined themselves as human beings.
The kind of music about which we are best informed is the vocal kind, precisely, music combined with words. There are many reasons why this may have happened, mainly the fact that most music in antiquity was preserved not by notation but by memory and tradition (which continued also when music notation started to be developed by professional musicians and instrument players, approximately between the fifth and fourth century BC: see Hagel 2009). Therefore in most cases, when no musical score was preserved, only the words survived: when the Alexandrian librarians organized the poetic material of their past, creating the repertoire on which we currently base our knowledge of ancient Greek literature, they probably had no music notation associated to what they called “lyric poetry” (lyrikē poiēsis, that is, poetry sung to the lyre or, more generally, to any musical instrument),3 probably so termed in order to stress its musicality just at the time when it was actually disappearing.
It is certainly true that vocal music, performed by solo singers or by choruses, was also described as the most important and meaningful kind of music: according to Plato (Republic 398d), a musical composition (melos) always refers to a combination of elements, which includes words (logos), as well as tune (harmonia) and rhythm (rhythmos), and, when these two latter elements occur with no words, “it is extremely difficult to understand what is intended, or what worthwhile representation is like” (Laws 669e).4 A verbal content seems in fact to have been implied also in instrumental solo pieces, as in the case of the famous Pythikos nomos, usually performed during the Apollinean festivals (see below).
One of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek music was certainly its close link to a particular occasion and function. Again Plato, in the Laws (700b), suggests a strict classification of musical “types and forms” (eidē kai schēmata, on which later sources also continued to rely) on the basis of their employment in religious and social rituals, complaining about the contemporary commingling of musical genres and cults or social events. Especially in religious music, within which we should include all music performances circumscribing in various ways the central act of sacrifice, the text was extraordinarily important: myths and traditional stories of gods and heroes formed the substance of vocal poems and were supposed to reinforce religious belief in the audience (Kowalzig 2008, esp. 13–15). The theatricality of this myth telling was then enhanced and made more effective by dance, song, and musical accompaniment, occurring all together in spectacular choral exhibitions.
Choreia, that is, the practice of choral dancing and singing in public spaces, was mainly a collective act of religious worship by the community, serving the purposes of reinforcing the religious creed, educating the citizens, and, consequently, bringing order to society (see especially Plato Laws 654a–b). There were choral songs for many different occasions, such as marriages (hymenaioi and epithalamioi), funerals (thrēnoi), female transition rites (partheneia), and sporting victories (epinikia), all basically imbued with the same religious elements we find in more properly cultic repertoire, that is, sung prayers addressed to the gods, like the dithyrambs and the paeans, the former devoted to Dionysus, the latter to Apollo. Nevertheless, although such a distinction is fundamentally correct, both choral forms underwent a significant transformation during the centuries: the paean could occasionally be addressed to other gods, or be sung on many different occasions, sometimes by a soloist too; the dithyramb was soon secularized, at least in content, becoming an articulate and sophisticated art form.
The instruments which usually accompanied choral exhibitions were the aulos (a reed-blown pipe, almost always played in pairs) or the kithara (a square-based string instrument), both professional organa thus unsuitable for general education (see Aristotle, Politics 1341a), which had the advantage of playing louder than other instruments (thanks to the presence of reeds, in the case of the aulos, and to a large sound box, in the case of the kithara) and could, hence, be heard over long distances outdoors.
Literary sources all agree on pointing out the importance of the “pleasure” that, experienced by participants in the religious rituals thanks to the added value of musical ingredients, could become a kind of “offering” to the divinity which, in this way, might secure his or her assistance or favor. In the Iliad, the end of the quarrel between the Greek army and Apollo is propitiated by a paean with the purpose of arousing pleasure in the god (Il. 1.472–4), while in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (145ff.) the deity “delights his heart” (epiterpetai ētor) when, in Delos, the Ionians come together and “turn their minds to boxing and dancing and song, and delight [terpousin] in them, whenever they set up their festival”; in the Laws (654a), Plato furnishes a (fanciful) etymology of the word choros (“they have given choruses/chorous their name by derivation from the joy/chara that is natural to them”) which clearly indicates how a joyful disposition was felt to be inherent in choreia; finally, some centuries later, Strabo (probably drawing on Poseidonios) still states that “music, which includes dancing as well as rhythm and melody at the same time, by the delight [hēdonēi] it affords and by its artistic beauty [kallitechniāi], brings us in touch with the divine” (Strabo 10.3.9, tr. Furley and Bremer 2001).
Therefore in ancient Greek culture an aesthetically pleasing effect of music performances was strictly connected with the fulfillment of their main aims, especially in religious contexts. Poets frequently used synesthetic imagery to describe sounds specifically on the basis of their pleasant perception, as in the metaphor (very common in poetic contexts) according to which lyric poets were described as bees distilling their “sweet honey,” that is, their melodies.
This kind of comment, however, turned out to be negative when the pleasure aroused by music was directed toward inappropriate ends, as in the case of some forms of cultic music which soon started to lose their original religious flavor to become sophisticated spectacular art forms, whose textual content was overshadowed by a virtuoso and musically demanding performance. Dithyrambs, in particular, paved the way to late fifth–fourth century BC avant-garde music style: composers such as Melanippides of Melos, Cinesias of Athens, Timotheus of Miletus, and Philoxenus of Cythera were unfavorably described by comedians and philosophers just because of their pursuit of an aesthetically catchy poikilia (“variation and embellishment”) in their rhythms and melodies.5 From a practical point of view, musical poikilia was obtained through two main technical devices. The first was the abandoning of antistrophic composition, once typical of choral performances: in this formally constructed genre of poetry, one stanza, the strophe, was immediately followed by another, the antistrophe, which had exactly the same rhythm and meter and was sung to the same melody (a stable framework of repetitions most probably intended to aid the dance, but occasionally applied to solo songs too). Second, poikilia could be obtained by means of melodic movement through a multiplicity of notes belonging to different scales and genres (see Dionysus of Halicarnassus, The Arrangement of Words 19). Both of them were possible thanks to the organological innovations realized on the instrument which usually accompanied the dithyrambs, that is, the aulos, the first organon to become polychordotatos (i.e. “the most numerous-noted of all”) and panharmonios (namely, “on which it was possible to play all the harmoniai” or “scales”; see Plato, Republic 399d), having being bored with additional holes to permit modulations.
Even more subject to ancient criticism was, in this respect, solo singing, which more easily than choral songs could free itself from the rigid structure imposed by the rhythmical arrangement of syllabic quantities (that is, allowing music to apply its own rhythm to words and soon abandoning antistrophic composition); it was able to adapt the melody to the wider melodic range available on modern musical instruments. As a Peripatetic source explicitly states when commenting on musical innovations introduced by virtuosi in the Classical period, it is easier for an individual performer, especially if he is also a competitive artist (agōnistēs), to execute many modulations than for a large group of people, as in the case of choruses, in old times compounded only by free men, hence not professionals (Ps.-Aristotle, Problems 19.15).
Monodic songs (i.e. sung by an individual) could be performed both in contexts limited to a select audience, the most important of which was the symposium (whose singers, however, were simply members of the gathering, not technitai), and in front of a wider public, as in the case of solo competitions performed in local and Panhellenic religious festivals by agōnistai, whose primary goals were mass recognition and fame.
The symposium was the context for the enjoyment and preservation of a considerable part of Archaic and Classical melic poetry, composed specifically to be sung there or, if composed for a different occasion, re-performed and adapted to the new circumstances, as in the case of excerpts from theatrical songs. The most commonly played instruments to accompany solo songs within symposia were bowl lyres (both in their standard version, the chelys, and in the long-armed one, the barbitos) as well as pipes, more specifically, the aulos. On these occasions there were poetry competitions among participants, sometimes alternating song by song, sometimes “capping” the verses previously sung by another guest, as in performances of convivial songs called skolia (lit. “winding, obscure,” probably with reference to the twisted path of their performance), which frequently celebrated the amusements of the gathering. The function of music was mainly that of furnishing pleasure to symposiasts, as is clearly shown by the numerous references to the “sweetness” of singing and playing in fragments of such poetry. Within symposia, however, solo performances could hardly become highly sophisticated exhibitions involving technicalities, not even when professional instrumentalists of a specific kind were appointed for accompanying the singers, as well as for playing instrumental background music. These performers, indicated by iconographic evidence of the late sixth–fifth century BC as the official entertainers of symposiastic contexts, were aulētrides (i.e. “female aulos players”), psaltriai (i.e. “harp girls”), and orchēstrides (i.e. “female dancers”), women of low social position, basically accomplished courtesans called hetairai, hired by the host of the symposium for their artistic abilities as well as for the erotic enjoyment of male gatherings (see Rocconi 2006).
More explicitly devoted to bravura were the aulodic and especially kitharodic exhibitions, that is, performances of skilled solo singers, accompanied by an aulos player (aulōidia < aulos + ōidē) or by the singer himself on his kithara (kitharōidia < kithara + ōidē), who competed at the numerous religious festivals widespread in the Greek world. Professional kitharodic exhibitions (the most ancient and esteemed among solo performances; see Power 2010) may be dated back to the Mycenaean age, when minstrels such as those described in Homeric poems sang their songs to the four-stringed phorminx (a round-based box lyre, ancestor of the professional kithara) in order to amuse their public at royal courts. In Odyssey Book 8.246 ff., the king of the island of Scheria, Alcinous, asks Demodocus to play his “clear-sounding phorminx” and to start his solo, surrounded by some dancers, recalling how the Phaeacians “continually delight in feasting and the kitharis and dances.”
It is only with the establishment of religious feasts in which singers competed for prizes, however, that solo songs (called nomoi) became a fertile ground for innovation, with the purpose of amusing the ever more demanding audience. In the seventh century BC, the most famous solo singer who accompanied himself on the kithara was Terpander from Lesbos, the founder and first victor of musical competitions in the Karneia6 (one of the great national festivals of Sparta, the main center for Greek musical culture in the Archaic age), who also obtained four consecutive victories at the famous Pythian festivals at Delphi, at that time held every eight years. The kitharode’s fame led him to be credited with many inventions and improvements of solo performance: he is said to have invented the barbitos, increased the number of the lyre’s strings from four to seven and extended the scale from a seventh to an octave, introducing the Dorian nētē, as well as composed a set of kitharodic preludes (prooimia) in hexameters7. More importantly, he seems to have been the first to give a formal division to the structure of kitharodic nomos, supposedly divided by him into seven parts (Pollux Onomastikon 4.66): beginning (archa), after-the-beginning (metarcha, that is, in rhythmical responsion with the beginning), transition (katatropa, i.e. a transitional section), after-the-transition (metakatatropa, i.e. in responsion with the transition), navel (omphalos, that is, its central native part), seal (sphragis, where the author “signed” the composition), epilogue (epilogos).
Such an apparently strict structure attributed to this musical genre by the sources should most probably be intended not as a fixed and unchanging scheme that performers had to faithfully reproduce, but only as a sequence of sections with a pre-established form and content within which every author could, nevertheless, feel free to create or improvise his own melody. In fact its presence did not stop the soloists’ pursuit of constantly new and catchy devices to capture audiences’ attention and gain popularity, as well as to become richer! On this see Ps.-Plutarch On Music 1135d, where Timotheus and Philoxenus are said to have pursued the style called philanthrōpon (i.e. “designed to please the crowd”) and thematikon (i.e. “money-making”).
When Timotheus of Miletus (composer of both dithyrambs and kitharodic odes) created what we nowadays consider the best preserved example of New Music, that is, the famous kitharodic nomos titled The Persians, realized according to the most innovative music style previously mentioned, he seems to have preserved, at least partially, the traditional division set up by Terpander: after a main part in which the author describes the rout of the Persians at Salamis (likely, the omphalos of the song), he switches to a section (evidently functioning as sphragis) in which he defends himself against the Spartans, who had rejected him because of his musical innovations, placing himself within the great poetic tradition of the past (that is, Orpheus and Terpander); the poem closes then with a short prayer to Apollo (realizing the epilogos, probably incomplete).
This constant search for novelty and aesthetic glamour by kitharodic soloists has often been interpreted by modern scholars as a sign of progressive detachment of music performances from the religious frame within which they had always been inserted (for example, Barker 1995, 263f.), and this may certainly be true, at least to some extent. But given the fondness of Greeks for excellence in competition (and the high level of partiality in the evidence on secularization of traditional religious music), the growing demonstration by performers of their virtuoso skills could be explained also as an attempt to realize, in the most pleasant way possible, the best tribute to the gods (see the kallitechnia mentioned by Strabo): at the Pythian games, for instance, we are told that aulodic competitions were soon canceled because of their threnodic and lugubrious character, hence not pleasing enough for the gods (nor the audience!).8
The term nomos itself (lit. “law”) used by later sources to designate a “style of song with a prescribed harmonia and a determinate rhythm” (Suda n 478), so called, we are told, “because deviation from the form of pitching established for each type was not permitted” (Ps.-Plutarch On music 1133b–c), did not come into common use in the musical field until the fifth, maybe even the fourth century BC (see Barker 1984, 250). Although traditional solo songs had certainly existed before that time, the etymological connection between special categories of compositions and the inviolability of their regulations (in strict connection with their religious aims) should most probably be ascribed to Plato’s Laws, a dialogue where the philosopher constantly recalls how all the elements of mousikē need to be consistent with one another and to fit into a particular genre by law (700a–701b) and where he skillfully shifts from the proper meaning to a metaphoric usage of the term nomos (see esp. 799e, where he talks about the musical usage of this term as “a strange [atopon] fact”). In substance, we can reasonably assume that such a strict regulation ascribed to traditional religious music is fictitious and that an aesthetic of “pleasure” has always been perceived as essential to catch the audience’s attention and reinforce its belief.
Thanks to immense popularity gained by the kitharodes in these competitive festivals, the word nomos came then to be used especially of their performances. But it is worth remembering that in the same contexts in which these technitai excelled, there were also competitions of instrumental nomoi, so that they were grouped into four classes in total: kitharōidia, aulōidia, kitharistikē (sc. technē, instrumental solos for kithara), and auletikē (sc. technē, instrumental solos for aulos). According to Plato (Gorgias 501d–e), auletic and kitharistic were definitely agonistic arts aimed merely at pleasing their audience (tēn hēdonēn […] monon diōkein): indeed we know that, thanks to the exceptional organological developments of the aulos mentioned above, auletikē especially became very fashionable in that period.
Plato’s polemic against instrumental music in the Laws, however, says something more. Although the philosopher reduces the use of the aulos and the kithara, when they do not accompany dance and song, to “uncultured and vulgar showmanship” (amousia kai thaumatourgia), nevertheless he does not dismiss instrumental music as pure nonsense, leaving open the possibility that it was always a mimēsis of something, like vocal music: all he says, in fact, is that (lacking words) it is extremely difficult to identify what it represents or is trying to represent:
and further, the composers tear rhythm and posture away from melody, putting bare words into metres, setting melody and rhythm without words, and using the kithara and the aulos without the voice, a practice in which it is extremely difficult – since rhythm and harmonia occur with no words – to understand what is intended, and what worthwhile representation it is like. It is essential that we accept the principle that all such practices are utterly inartistic, if they are so enamoured of speed and precision and animal noises that they use the music of the aulos and the kithara for purposes other than the accompaniment of dance and song: the use of either by itself is characteristic of uncultured and vulgar showmanship.
(Plato Laws 669d–670a)
This mimetic character of instrumental music (which also aims at representing characters and dispositions of the soul) seems actually to be implicit in the titles and contents of auletic and kitharistic nomoi handed down by the sources9: among kitharistic nomoi, the nomoi of Zeus, of Athena, and of Apollo are mentioned, while, among the auletic ones, we are informed of the Polykephalos (lit. “many-headed,” in honor of Apollo), the Harmateios (maybe so called because it musically describes the acute and thin sound produced by the chariot’s route, see Etymologicum Magnum 145.25ff.), the nomoi of Ares and of Athena. The most famous of this latter group is the so-called Pythikos nomos (of which also a kitharistic version was later realized), providing an outstanding example of how these pieces may be connected with the divinities to whom they were addressed: in other words, each of them had a specific cultic function not only thanks to the religious contexts of its performance (i.e. the various festivals in honor of the numerous gods and goddesses of the Greek Pantheon), but especially by virtue of the narrative character attributed by the Greeks to pure instrumental music and of the semantic content any of these performances was supposed to convey.
Indeed, according to Pollux, the Pythikos nomos had five parts and was
a representation [dēlōma, lit. showing, display] of the battle of Apollo against the serpent. In the peira [test, trial] he surveys the ground to see if it is suitable for the contest. In the katakeleusmos [challenge] he calls up the serpent, and in the iambikon he fights: the iambikon also includes sounds like those of the salpinx and gnashing like those of the serpent as it grinds its teeth after being pierced with arrows. The spondeion represents [dēloi] the victory of the god; and in the katachoreusis [dance of triumph] the god performs a dance of victory.
(Pollux Onomastikon 4.84, cf. Strabo 9.3.10)
This account insists, also verbally (see the use of the verb deloō and its derivative dēlōma), on the descriptive and mimetic character of the five musical sections of the piece (and it was probably the same in the other instrumental nomoi, if, as it seems, they described mythical episodes related to the divinities involved), realized both through mechanical devices (like, for instance, the so-called syrinx of the aulos, a kind of speaker-hole that could help to produce very high harmonics, used to imitate the hisses of the expiring snake) and through special playing techniques (like the odontismos, mentioned by other sources too, in which the glōtta was pushed against the tooth in order to reproduce the serpent’s teeth grinding: cf. Hesychius o 98 and Pollux Onomastikon 4.80).
This description of the Pythikos nomos provides a revealing example of contemporary audience expectations concerning the narrative content of any instrumental performance, although there was no unquestioned agreement on the means through which composers and musicians could realize it, if we are to believe what we are told about the piper Telephanes of Megara, who was “so strongly opposed to the syrinx of the aulos that he forbade the makers of auloi to build it into the instruments, and it was primarily for that reason that he refused to perform at the Pythian games” (Ps.-Plutarch On music 1138a).
The genre that more than any other developed the potential, as well as the problems, of the mimetic features inherent in the ancient concept of mousikē, nevertheless, was musical theater. In ancient Greece, theatrical drama was part of a religious festival devoted to Dionysus, originally organized by the polis of Athens and later widespread in the entire Greek world. The main element of its program (which also comprised spectacular dithyrambs) was the competitive performance of dramatic plays that always involved music: in tragedies and comedies, choral songs called stasima were sung and danced to the accompaniment of the aulos in the orchēstra and interspersed with actors’ episodes which, though usually spoken, displayed a strong rhythmical beat based on iambic meter. Sometimes parts of actors’ roles (as well as some choral parts, as in the case of the march anapaests of the parodos, i.e. the entering song of the chorus in the orchēstra) could be delivered as a kind of recitative called parakatalogē (i.e. katalogē, that is, recitation “beside” or “along with” musical accompaniment, the irregularity of which was thought to produce a tragic effect, see Ps.-Aristotle Problems 19.6) or, from the mid-fifth century BC onward, were more often sung as monodies, lyrical duets, or in concert with the chorus. These duets were called “amoebean” songs (from ameibō, lit. “to exchange”), while the formal lament, in which the voices of actors and chorus were interwoven in extended threnody typical of tragedies, was termed kommos (from koptō, lit. “to beat,” i.e. the head and breast in lamentation).
Besides acting as an outstanding medium to reinforce ethical values in the community and to stress Athenian cultural self-assertion among the other Greek poleis, theatrical performances accomplished and progressively enhanced the aesthetics of spectacular entertainment, relying mostly on their musical components (especially since the second half of the fifth century BC, when innovative playwrights such as Euripides were influenced by the mimetic and expressionist music typical of dithyrambic and kitharodic composers, and exponentially increasing in the fourth century and in the Hellenistic period). According to Aristotle, in fact, “of the other elements which enrich tragedy, the most important is song-making” (Poetics 1450b, tr. Halliwell 1986) and even Plutarch, between the first and second century AD, describes the experience of watching tragedy as “a wonderful aural and visual experience” (On the fame of the Athenians 5, 348c). The consciousness of this phenomenon in later centuries was such that ancient theater, especially tragedy, inspired the Western world’s first modern operas, which began as an attempt to restore Greek drama to the stage. Indeed, the paradigm of ancient Greek tragedy forms the basis of theoretical conceptualizations of the origin of the opera by members of the Florentine Camerata (a group of humanists, musicians, and poets gathered under the patronage of Giovanni Bardi, in sixteenth-century Florence), offering an authoritative example of the blending between words and music for expressive purposes (even if, from a practical point of view, this new musical form should be actually considered a natural evolution of contemporary theatrical genres, such as the pastoral drama and the intermezzo; see Pirrotta 1975).
But if modern theatrical staging of musical drama was, from the start, a controversial artistic attempt to fit music to words and stories (since, as some modern scholars have pointed out, the formal repetitiveness of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music could produce what they call disanalogy when combined with the linear, directional character of fictional narrative),10 ancient tragedy posed no problem to intellectuals with respect to the combination of these two different expressive means (not even to Plato, since all he cared about was the “goodness” of what was represented in any kind of artistic medium: his unwillingness to grant theatrical genres the status of useful art was due only to the morally bad – hence useless, if not dangerous – models they offered to spectators, not to any inconsistencies between the two levels of mimēsis).11 The ease with which musical theatre grew in antiquity, without posing any problem of accommodation between musical structure and dramatic flow, may principally be explained by the intimately musical nature of ancient Greek language, so that the representation on stage of mythical stories through sung performance did not seem implausible to the audience. The situation is completely different with modern languages, which do not have any musical form. Let us consider what Jacopo Peri, a member of the Camerata, says in his introduction to Le musiche sopra l’Euridice (1600, fol. a1r):
Seeing that dramatic poetry was concerned and that therefore one ought to imitate with song someone speaking (and without doubt people never spoke singing), I decided that the ancient Greeks and Romans (who according to the opinion of many sang entire tragedies on stage) employed a melody that, elevated beyond ordinary speech, descended so much from the melody of song that it assumed an intermediate form.
(tr. Palisca 1985)
More importantly, in the beginning Greek dramas did not display closed or self-contained musical forms (like, for instance, da capo arias, typical of seventeenth-century melodrama) in those parts of the play where the plot evolved: while the stasima usually presented the strophic arrangement typical of ancient choral poetry (always keeping a “diegetic,” i.e. narrative, content, since they were not exactly acted, but sung and danced by a chorus), the ongoing story within actors’ episodes was not originally set to music, but simply arranged according to the rhythmic patterns of iambic verse. Only when professional actors started to realize the most pathetic moments of tragedy through song (Aristotle, Poetics 1449b) did dramas undergo a deep transformation that we can compare to the passage from the so-called stile rappresentativo of Monteverdi’s operas (whose driving force was a vocal style faithful to human speech, a kind of “conversation in tones” where human talking was dramatically represented) to what we could call “number opera” (namely, opera seria), consisting of separate, self-contained musical movements (almost exclusively solo arias) connected by rapid musical speeches (recitativo secco) which pushed the plot forward (Kivy 2002, 164ff.).
Such a highly expressive style was strictly connected to the emergence of professional performers, whose first evidence is the institution of a prize in 449 BC for the best actor in the City Dionysia, the most important Athenian festival devoted to dramatic performances. These professionals gradually became virtuoso singers, who went on tour as distinguished protagonists: emblematic is the case of the professional actor Theodoros, the most famous tragic performer of the fourth century BC, who specialized in female roles of Sophoclean and Euripidean dramas (which had become repertoire plays in the late Classical period).
It was these actors themselves who contributed to the vast and rapid spread of the musical theatre outside Attica (though there is evidence attesting to the spread of interest in drama since the fifth century BC; see Taplin 1993, 2007), transforming it into an international genre that soon became the most popular kind of entertainment in the post-Classical history of musical performance.
In the Hellenistic age, music was definitely put in the hands of experts and virtuosi. This phenomenon led to the constitution and spread of guilds of performers called “Artists of Dionysus” (Dionysiakoi technitai), active across and beyond Greece, which could offer not only musicians, poets, and actors, but also costume makers and trainers for any theatrical exhibition of the period.12 The “stars” of these guilds were tragōidoi and kōmōidoi, traveling professional singers who could enjoy huge earnings and fame, honored by statues and civic rights in the cities where they performed. Often their exhibitions resembled concerts or recitals rather than complete theatrical productions, since (as far as we know) they seem to have included excerpts from famous dramas of the past instead of the performance of the complete ancient texts: in this new kind of show, some of the passages originally conceived for spoken delivery could be set to music, and sections that were originally choral be transferred to soloists (Gentili 1977).13 As a consequence, the function of musical ingredients as a popular means of entertainment was gradually heightened, since theatrical performances no longer had to convey the ethical values of the community but simply to amuse the new and more variegated audience, geographically widespread in a new globalized world.
The aesthetics typical of this modern “show business” found fertile ground in Rome, where it developed on an even larger scale. In Roman spectacles, the practice of turning musical performances into a show was often expanded, as in the pompa triumphalis (a religious and civic parade, accompanied by trumpeters, for the entry of the vir triumphalis into the city) or the pompa funebris (in honor of a deceased person of high rank, usually accompanied by several musical instruments, including brass).
The most spectacular forms of entertainment continued to be the theatrical, essentially performed during the ludi (lit., “games”), that is, religious festivities in honor of a god, a deceased personage, or a commemorative historical event (such as triumphs in war), which soon became the best means by which the empire could consolidate its political power and manipulate the masses, and were hence quite secularized occasions. Besides traditional tragedy and comedy, new theatrical genres emerged, which soon replaced the audience’s preferences for the more conventional dramas based on Greek models (whose Roman adaptation, however, seems to have explored and expanded the musical potential of their Greek models: Plautus’ palliata is a good example of this phenomenon; see Moore forthcoming). They were the genres of mime and pantomime, the popularity of which increased especially during the early empire.
While mime performance was at the beginning largely based on improvisation and became literary only later (featuring a high degree of realism, accomplished through the absence of theatrical masks and vivid dialogues among the actors, with the occasional presence of music and dance), the pantomime or tragoedia saltata offered the public something similar to modern ballet interpretation of serious drama. A solo actor and dancer (the saltator or planipes, lit. “who wears no shoes,” in order to have greater freedom of movement), wearing a closed-mouth mask, mimed a mythical story playing “all” (pantos) the parts himself, supported by a chorus of singers and by a small orchestra of wind instruments (aulos and panpipes, a set of reed tubes bound together with wax) and percussion (among which there were: kymbala, i.e. small brass cymbals; sistra, consisting of handle and a U-shaped metal frame; the kroupezion, that is, a sandal with an iron sole used to mark time for the dance). In this kind of theatrical performance (which, though originating in Greece, flourished throughout the Roman Empire) the pivotal elements of mimēsis were essentially dance and bodily movements, no longer equally balanced with music and words, the three key elements of ancient mousikē, if we are to believe Libanius when he says that, in a pantomime performance, “dancing is not made complete by the songs, but it is for the sake of the dancing that the songs are worked out” (Defence on Behalf of Dancers 88, tr. Molloy 1996). In this show, the dance seems to have been completely detached from the original ethical and religious values expressed by the ancient and illustrious choreia, especially in the opinion of those who judged the pantomime an emblematic expression of decadence, regarded as typical of the period:14 this is clearly shown by the two rhetorical attempts of defending the pantomime in antiquity (Lucianus’ On Dance and Libanius’ Defence on Behalf of Dancers), which tried to connect its origin to the noble Greek tradition of the past.
In Roman culture, music also accompanied all the other spectacular entertainment of public games, including gladiator combats, whose typical musical instruments were loud trumpets (tubae), horns (cornua), and water organ (hydraulis): musicians accompanying gladiatorial games are often displayed on contemporary mosaics, like those from the seaside villa at Dar Buc Ammera in Libya. Besides this, kitharodic soloists (citharoedi) and histrionic singers of tragic songs (tragoedi) gained outstanding popularity among the masses, as the fascination of the emperor Nero (called princeps citharoedus by the poet Juvenal, Satires 8.198) for musical exhibitions clearly shows (Power 2010, 3ff.).
This aesthetics of “theatricalism”, within which music played such an important part, was greatly promoted by the imperial power, chiefly for propagandistic purposes, and lasted for centuries (still in the fourth century AD, though disapproving them, Saint Augustine admitted the emotional mass reactions created by them in the audience; see Confessions 3.2), vividly shaping the modern image of Roman antiquity.15
Scholarly publications on ancient Greek and Roman music have interestingly increased in recent years: a good introduction to the topic may be found in West (1992), Mathiesen (1999), Landels (2000), and Rocconi (2009). The most complete and up-to-date collection of extant melodies and fragments is Pöhlmann and West (2001). Theoretical texts on different scientific aspects of musical inquiry have become more widely known and read thanks to new recently available modern translations and comments: the best collection of texts is in Barker (1989), where the author translates and comments in English on all the relevant evidence on harmonic and acoustic sciences. More specific books on music theory are: Bélis (1986), Barker (2007), Hagel (2009), and Creese (2010) (on different aspects of harmonic science); Martinelli (2009) (where musical activities and philosophical reflections on music in the Hellenistic age are investigated); Pelosi (2010) (adopting an innovative approach to the study of the binomial of music and philosophy in Platonic writings); Huffmann (2011) (which collects the essays presented at the first international conference wholly devoted to the figure of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the Peripatetic author traditionally regarded as the major musical authority of the ancient world). Recent bibliography on ancient Greek and Roman music is listed and discussed at http://www.moisasociety.org/de-musicis.