Part One

The Ancient and

Medieval Worlds
Chapter

1
Music in Antiquity
 The Earliest Music
 Prehistoric musical cultures
• limited understanding, lack of written record
 Historical traces
• physical remains: instruments, performing spaces
• visual images of musicians, instruments,
performances
• writings about music and musicians
• music itself: notation, oral tradition, recordings
 Prehistoric music-making
• Stone Age, oldest surviving instruments: bone
flutes, 40,000 B.C.E.
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 The Earliest Music (cont’d)
 Prehistoric music-making (cont’d)
• Paleolithic cave paintings show musical
instruments
• Neolithic era: pottery flutes, rattles, and drums
• sixth millennium B.C.E.: Turkish wall paintings
 drummers play for dance and the hunt
• Bronze Age (fourth millennium B.C.E.)
 metal instruments: bells, jingles, cymbals, rattles, horns
 plucked string instruments: shown in stone carvings
 Invention of writing
• end of prehistoric period; history of music begins
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 Music in Ancient Mesopotamia
 Mesopotamia: land between Tigris and
Euphrates
• first true cities and civilizations emerge fourth
millennium B.C.E.
• Sumerians developed first known forms of writing
 cuneiform (wedge-shaped) impressions on tablets
 adopted by later civilizations: Akkadians, Babylonians
 many tablets mention music
 Archeological remains and images
• pictures: how instruments were held, played,
circumstances
 Music in Ancient Mesopotamia
(cont’d)
 Archeological remains and images (cont’d)
• surviving instruments reveal details for
reconstruction
• 2500 B.C.E. royal tombs at Ur (Sumerian city):
lyres and harps found
 lyres: strings run parallel to resonating soundboard,
attached to crossbar supported by two arms
 harp: strings perpendicular to soundboard, supporting
neck attached to soundbox
 bull lyre: distinctly Sumerian
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 Music in Ancient Mesopotamia
(cont’d)
 Archeological remains and images (cont’d)
 soundbox features bull’s head, religious significance
 variable number of strings run from bridge on soundbox to
crossbar
 strings knotted around sticks, change of tension allows for tuning
 other instruments: lutes, pipes, drums, cymbals,
clappers, rattles, bells
 Uses for music in Mesopotamian cultures
• best evidence for music from elite classes;
rulers, priests
 resources to make instruments; hire musicians, artists,
and scribes
 Music in Ancient Mesopotamia
(cont’d)
 Uses for music in Mesopotamian cultures
(cont’d)
• similar to today’s uses
 wedding songs, funeral laments
 military music, work songs
 nursery songs, dance music, tavern music
 entertainment at feasts
 songs to address the gods, accompany ceremonies and
processions
 epics sung with instrumental accompaniment
 Music in Ancient Mesopotamia
(cont’d)
 Written sources
• ca. 2500 B.C.E. word lists/terms: tuning
procedures, performers, techniques, genres
• Enheduanna (fl. ca. 2300 B.C.E.) earliest
composer known by name
 Akkadian high priestess at Ur
 composed hymns
 texts survive on cuneiform tablets
• 1800 B.C.E. Babylonians wrote down music
 writings describe tuning, intervals, improvisations,
techniques
 genres include love songs, laments, hymns
 Music in Ancient Mesopotamia
(cont’d)
 Written sources (cont’d)
 7-note diatonic scales: parallels in ancient Greek music
 earliest known musical notation ca. 1400–1250 B.C.E.
 tablet found at Ugarit, Syrian coast
 music played from memory or improvised
 notation used as written record
 Other civilizations
• India and China developed independently from
Mesopotamia
• rich Egyptian musical traditions: artifacts,
paintings, hieroglyphs in tombs
• ancient Israel: scant images and music
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 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought
 Ancient Greece
• Greek peninsula, islands in the Aegean, much of
Asia Minor, southern Italy and Sicily, colonies
ringing the Mediterranean and Black Seas
• numerous images, few surviving instruments,
writings, forty examples of music
 Instruments and their uses
• sources: writings, archeological remains, hundreds
of clay pot images
• aulos: two-piped reed instrument
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Instruments and their uses (cont’d)
 finger holes, mouthpiece with reed, long tube with
beating tongue
 images suggest unison playing
 used to worship Dionysus, god of fertility and wine
 Dionysian festivals in Athens: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides
 accompanied choruses and other musical portions
• lyre: seven strings strummed with a plectrum
 tortoise shell soundbox with stretched oxhide
 right hand strummed with plectrum, left hand fingers
touched strings
 associated with Apollo, god of light, prophecy, learning,
and the arts, especially music and poetry
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 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Instruments and their uses (cont’d)
 learning to play lyre, core element of education in
Athens
 used to accompany dancing, singing, recitation of epic
poetry
 Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
 provided music for weddings, played for recreation
• kithara: large lyre
 used for processions, sacred ceremonies, theater
 played while standing
• music learned primarily by ear, played from memory
or improvised despite well-developed notation by
fourth century B.C.E.
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek musical thought
• two kinds of writings on music
 philosophical doctrines
 Plato (ca. 429–347 B.C.E.) Republic and Timaues
 Aristotle (384–22 B.C.E.) Politics
 systematic descriptions of the materials of music (music
theory)
 Pythagoras (d. ca. 500 B.C.E.)
 Aristides Quintilianus (4th century C.E.)
• music in Greek mythology
 music inventors and practitioners: gods and demigods
 Apollo, Hermes, Amphion, and Orpheus
 music (Greek mousiké) derives from word for Muses
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 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek musical thought (cont’d)
• music pervaded all Greek life
 music was an art for enjoyment
 science related to arithmetic and astronomy
• music as performing art called melos
 surviving music is monophonic (single melodic line)
 pictures show accompaniment with lyre or kithara
 possible heterophony or polyphony
 “perfect melos”: melody, text, and stylized dance
 conceived as a whole
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek musical thought (cont’d)
• music and poetry were nearly synonymous
 blend of text, rhythm, and harmonia
 harmonia: unification of parts as orderly whole
 encompasses mathematical proportions, philosophical ideas,
order of the universe
 no name for artful speech that did not include music
 “lyric” poetry sung to the lyre
 “tragedy” incorporates noun meaning “the art of singing”
 other Greek words for poetry were musical terms, “hymn”
• Pythagoras: music was inseparable from numbers,
key to the universe
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 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek musical thought (cont’d)
 rhythms ordered by numbers
 discovered intervals as ratios: octave 2:1, 5th 3:2, 4th 4:3
• Claudius Ptolemy (fl. 127–48 C.E.): leading
astronomer of antiquity, writer on music
 music connected to astronomy, harmonia
 mathematical laws and proportions: movements of
planets correspond to notes, intervals, and scales
 Plato “harmony of the spheres”: unheard music,
revolutions of the planets
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Music and ethos
• music affects ethical character (etho)
 Pythagoras view: music governed by mathematical laws,
operated visible and invisible world
 harmonia could influence other realms
 human soul kept in harmony by numerical relationships
 music could penetrate the soul, restore inner harmony
• Aristotle’s Politics: music affected behavior
 music that imitated ethos aroused same ethos in listener
 imitation of ethos through use of scale type, style of
melody, rhythms and poetic genres
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Music and ethos (cont’d)
• Plato and Aristotle: gymnastics disciplines body,
music disciplines the mind
 Plato’s Republic:
 two must be balanced, certain music suitable
 endorsed Dorian and Phrygian harmoniai, fostered temperance
and courage
 musical conventions must not be changed
 lawlessness in art led to licenses in manners and anarchy in
society
 Aristotle’s Politics:
 less restrictive than Plato
 music for enjoyment and education
 negative emotions purged through music and drama
 menial and vulgar to play solely for pleasure or others
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek music theory
• earliest theoretical works: Aristoxenus, Harmonic
Elements and Rhythmic Elements (ca. 330 B.C.E.)
 pupil of Aristotle
• important later writers: Cleonides (ca. second or third
century C.E.), Ptolemy, Aristides Quintilianus
• Aristoxenus
 Rhythmic Elements: musical rhythm closely aligned with
poetic rhythm
 Harmonic Elements: continuous movement and diastematic
(intervallic) movement
 melodies consist of notes, interval, scale
 definitions establish basis for all later music theory
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek music theory (cont’d)
• tetrachord: four notes spanning P4th
 outer notes stationary
 genera (classes) of tetrachords
 diatonic genus: oldest and most natural
 chromatic: most recent
 enharmonic: most refined, difficult to hear
• Greater Perfect System: tetrachords combined to cover
larger range
 four tetrachords plus added lowest note, 2-octave span
 conjunct: shared note
 disjunt: separated by whole tone
 middle note called “mese”
 tetrachords named to indicate place in system
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 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek music theory (cont’d)
 “meson” tetrachord 4th below the mese
 “hypaton” (first), lowest tetrachord
 “diezeugmenon” (disjunct), above the mese
 “hypabolaion” (of the extremes)
 not based on absolute pitch
 Lesser Perfect System: spanning octave plus a 4th
• species of consonances
 Cleonides: limited number of ways P4th, 5th, and octave
divided into tones and semitones in diatonic genus
 seven species of octave; division of octave into species of
4th and 5th
 Mixolydian, Lydian, Phrygian, Dorian, Hypolydian, Hypophrygian,
Hypodorian
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 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Greek music theory (cont’d)
 octave species parallel Babylonian diatonic tunings
 octave species lack principal note
 Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian: ethnic names
 music styles of different regions of Greek world
 Plato and Aristotle used these names for harmoniai, scale types or
melodic styles
 prefixes (e.g. Hypo-) multiplied number of names
 tonos, scale or set of pitches within a specific range
 Fifteen different tonoi
 transpose system of tones up or down
 tonoi associated with character and mood
 “harmonia,” “tonoi,” “Dorian”: meanings defined by
context
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Ancient Greek music
• forty-five fragments survive from fifth century
B.C.E. to fourth century C.E.
 Greek texts, when Greece was dominated by Rome
 most recovered in twentieth century
 notation: notes and duration placed above text
 two fragmentary choruses, plays by Euripides
(ca. 485–06 B.C.E.)
• later pieces more complete
 two complete Delphic hymns to Apollo, 128–27 B.C.E.
 epigram to Seikolos, epitaph on tombstone, first century C.E.
 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Ancient Greek music (cont’d)
 four hymns by Mesomedes of Crete, second century C.E.
 consistencies, correspondence between theory and practice
• style example: Epitaph of Seikolos (NAWM 1)
 diatonic melody, octave range, Phrygian octave species
 Iastian tonos: system transposed up a whole step
 text consistent with tonos: moderation
 melody moderate in ethos: rising 5th and 3rds balanced
by falling gestures
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 Music in Ancient Greek Life and
Thought (cont’d)
 Ancient Greek music (cont’d)
• style example: Euripides’ Orestes (NAWM 2)
 papyrus from ca. 200 B.C.E.
 middle portion of seven lines of text; musical notation above
 diatonic with chromatic or enharmonic genus
 instrumental notes interspersed with vocal
 music reinforces ethos of intense agitation and grief
 small chromatic or enharmonic intervals
 stark changes of register
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 Music in Ancient Rome
 Less evidence survives for music of ancient
Rome
• images, some instruments, written descriptions
• no settings of Latin text survive
 First and second centuries of Roman Empire
took musical culture from Greece
• lyric poetry often sung
• Cicero, Quintillian, other writers: cultivated people
should be educated in music
• Greek architecture, music, and philosophy imported
into Rome
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 Music in Ancient Rome (cont’d)
 First and second centuries of Roman Empire
took musical culture from Greece (cont’d)
• famous virtuosos, large choruses and orchestras,
grandiose musical festivals and competitions
• emperors supported and cultivated music
 Nero aspired to personal fame as musician, competed in
contests
• third and fourth centuries economic decline: music
on large and expensive scale ceased
 Music in Ancient Rome (cont’d)
 Instruments
• tibia (Roman version of aulos)
 important in religious rites, military music, and theatrical
performances
• tuba: long straight trumpet, derived from Etruscans
 used in religious, state, and military ceremonies
• cornu and buccina: G-shaped circular horns
 No trace of direct influence of Roman music
 The Greek Heritage
 Characteristics of Greek music continued in later
Western music
• melody shaped by rhythm and meter of words
• musicians relied on memory and conventions of
formulas
 Aspects of Greek thought influenced later
generations
• music influences human behavior
• medieval church music and theory used Greek
concepts
• opera composers look to Greek tragedies for models