CHAPTER 25
Pauline A. LeVen
This chapter belongs to the section on “authors and forms” but the so-called “New Music” is, properly speaking, neither. The modern expression “New Music” refers both to a set of authors active on the Athenian theater stage between 430 and 380 BC, and to a set of formal changes that affected certain musical genres (in particular the dithyramb, the citharodic nome, and the sung parts of tragedy). But how sudden, how pervasive, and how revolutionary these changes were is difficult to establish: between the rhetoric of the New Musicians themselves, the biographical practices and ideological biases of ancient authors writing on music history, and the methodological premises of modern critics, it is very difficult to disentangle what is myth from what was reality. Nevertheless, this chapter aims at answering four questions: what is meant by the term “New Music”? What was new about the “New Music”? What did it sound, look, and feel like as experience? And what are new roads to explore the New Music? Although the questions look simple, the answers are complex and reveal why there has been a recent surge of critical interest for this fascinating phenomenon.
What Is Meant by the “New Music”?
The term “New Music” is a modern coinage used to designate a musical phenomenon that took Athens by storm in the last 30 years or so of the fifth century BC and that affected the dithyramb (a song performed by a chorus of 50 men or 50 boys), the sung parts of tragedy, and the citharodic nome (a song performed by a solo singer accompanying himself on the cithara). No expression equivalent to “New Music” was used in antiquity, probably because what is now conceived of as a distinct phase of literary and musical history was then not conceptualized as one movement.1 To refer to what we call New Music, ancient critics instead talked of “theater music,” in reference to the performance venue in which the new style could be observed: the theater of Dionysus.2
Who Were the “New Musicians”?
Although there was never an official “canon” of the New Musicians (as opposed to that of the nine archaic lyric poets created by the Alexandrian scholars), the New Music is associated with several key figures: Timotheus of Miletus, Philoxenus of Cythera, Cinesias of Athens, and Agathon of Athens. Most of what we know about these composers comes from biased depictions and anecdotes transmitted by literary sources that need to be carefully studied in the light of what we know of ancient biographical practices, especially the practice of constructing the biography of the author based on statements that could be read as self-references in his poetry, and the rhetorical conventions of different genres (including the genre of the ancient anecdote or chreia).3
Timotheus of Miletus (ca. 450–360 BC), the most famous of these New Musicians, is a case in point. Mostly known as a composer of citharodic nomes, he also wrote dithyrambs, hymns, preludes, encomia, and “some other songs.”4 Anecdotes depict him as a controversial figure, prosecuted by the Spartan authorities for his innovations—in particular for his addition of strings to the traditional seven-string cithara.5 But these claims all probably arise from a reading of the concluding part (the sphragis or “signature”) of his nome the Persians, where he describes himself as “hounded with fiery censure by the Spartans” (PMG 791, 209–210) and refers to his “eleven-struck meters and rhythms” (230). Other testimonies suggest instead that Timotheus had a considerable reputation as a traveling performer through the Mediterranean and various communities sought his services: the Ephesians for example paid him a thousand gold shekels for a hymn to Artemis to be composed by one of “the most talented poets of the day.”6 Timotheus spent the end of his life at the court of the king Archelaus of Macedon, who was surrounding himself with the biggest stars of the moment. His compositions continued to be popular after his death: his dithyramb Elpenor (PMG 779) won first prize in 320/319 BC in a performance by a boys’ chorus (IG. ii2 3055) and his songs became part of the “classical” repertoire, including in two conservative places, Arcadia and Crete.7
Another emblematic figure is Philoxenus of Cythera (ca. 435–380 BC). Philoxenus is known for his dithyrambs, the most famous of them being the Cyclops or Galatea. Although sources record a different composer, Philoxenus of Leucas, as the author of a poem of intriguing genre called the Dinner-Party, it is very likely that there was only one Philoxenus, and that by a phenomenon not uncommon in ancient biographical criticism, irreconcilable aspects of the personality of one poet were split between two individuals and that “another” Philoxenus was invented. As a matter of fact, numerous anecdotes are attached to the poet-composer, many of them relating his spirited exchanges with the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius (who, like Archelaos of Macedon, was surrounding himself with famous poets). Many anecdotal stories attached to Philoxenos involve issues of guest-friendship (xenia), appetite, and dining, as a form of learned discourse on his name (Philo-xenos) and on the theme of his compositions (especially his Dinner-Party).8 Like Timotheus, he became a classic after his death, praised for the originality of his compositions in comparison to later poets.9
Other figures associated with the movement are Cinesias of Athens (ca. 450–390 BC) and Agathon of Athens (ca. 448–400 BC). Nothing has survived of their production and both are mostly known from Aristophanes’ parodies of their style and for his mocking commentaries about their personal attributes. Once again, it is a commonplace of ancient literary criticism to see features of the portrait of the artist as a commentary on his style and poetic output:10 we thus find Cinesias in Aristophanes’ Birds (1372–1409) levitating and looking for inspiration for his dithyrambs among the clouds and other heights—a transparent form of commentary on the levity, vacuity, and emptiness of his dithyrambs.11 But again, epigraphic sources tell a different story and the Cinesias that was the butt of Aristophanic comedies was victorious in at least one musical competition.12 Much the same can be said about Agathon. Aristophanes mocks him and depicts him as adorning himself with women’s clothing to match his characters’ style (for example in the Thesmophoriazousae where Agathon wears the krokotos—the saffron-colored robe only worn by women). But he was surely a successful composer: Plato’s Symposium opens with Agathon’s recent victory at the tragic competition at the Lenaia in 416 BC. Like Euripides and Timotheus, he joined the court of the King Archelaos at the turn of the fourth century BC.
One more figure can be added to this cast: Euripides. He too was a target of Aristophanes’ conservative criticism and much of the Frogs is devoted to mocking the tragedian’s innovations, including his diction, his meters, and the singing style of his characters. His tragedy Trojan Women features the (presumably programmatic) use of one of the keywords of New Music, kainos (new), in a song where the chorus describes themselves as singing a “funeral dirge in strains unheard yet” (transl. E. P. Coleridge) (καινῶν ὕμνων… ὠιδὰν ἐπικήδειον, 512). The self-referential adjective might have been influenced by the vocabulary of Timotheus (which also explains why the two men were said to have been friends).
Other known New Musicians are Melanippides of Melos (c. 475–415 BC), Telestes of Selinous (c. 450–390 BC), Crexus (c. 440–380 BC), all composers of dithyrambs, and Phrynis of Mytilene (c. 460–400 BC), a composer of nomes, whose influence on Timotheus is noted by Aristotle (Metaphysics α 1.993b15).
How Much of the New Music Has Survived and What Are These Songs About?
Not a single note and little text of the New Music has survived, partly because New Music pieces, unlike archaic lyric, were not systematically cataloged by the Alexandrian scholars, and were never established in an official edition (unlike the text of Athenian tragedy established in an official edition by Lycurgus in 330 BC). As a result, only fragments preserved through quotations in later authors and compilers have survived. They amount to about 50 passages, totaling about 170 lines gleaned mostly from the sections of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae devoted to music (in books 4 and 14) and from the pseudo-Plutarch’s De musica, but also from Plutarch and Stobaeus.13 Additionally, a 240-line passage of Timotheus’ nome the Persians preserved on papyrus was found in 1904, and turns out to be the oldest surviving ancient “book.” This lucky find brings the total of preserved New Music lines to a little over 400 lines. To this number, one should add the choral odes of Euripides’ tragedies that are representative of the New Music style, and a few melic fragments tentatively attributed to him.
Because of the personal biases of the sources that preserved the fragments, it is difficult to get an overall sense of the themes that the New Music covered. But we can venture some guesses. Titles and fragments cluster around several distinctive thematic orientations: (1) mythological themes not treated in drama (Melanippides’ Persephone, Oeneus; Timotheus’ Sons of Phineus; Philoxenus’ Genealogy of the Aeacids); (2) narratives that pick up on minor episodes of the Homeric epics (Philoxenus’ Cyclops or Galatea, Timotheus’ Cyclops, Elpenor, Scylla and Laertes); (3) historical and fictional topics (besides Timotheus’ Persians, we know that both Agathon and Philoxenus composed Mysians; Agathon was the first to compose a tragedy on a fictional subject, the Antheus).
What Is New About the New Music? The Construction of New Music
All critics agree with the broad definition of the New Music—a period of change in song composition and performance between 430 and 380 BC. But there is little agreement on what was so new about it: did it amount to a series of formal innovations? Did it arise because of socio-economic and cultural changes? Was it primarily a poetic and poetics revolution? At its most extreme, the question begs itself: is the New Music just a creation of its reception history, with nothing actually so scandalously new underlying it? Deciding on what answer to give tells a lot about the methodological leanings of the critic answering and about the ways music history can be written.
A Series of Individual Innovations?
Up until recently, most literary critics and historians of literature would apologize for the New Music when, and if, they mentioned it in their history of Greek literature. It was treated as, at its best, a disgraceful episode in the history of lyric, and at its worst as a monstrous event: in the hostile characterization of these scholars, the “lyric spirit” had died with Pindar, and novelty and talent went to other genres, especially prose, while mousikē was nearing its demise.
This dire evaluation was a reflection of three types of ancient sources that disparaged the New Music: first, comic (especially Aristophanic) caricatures of the New Musicians, which ridiculed the individuals and their poetic style; second, the comments of Plato, Aristotle, and Aristoxenus, who took a moral stance to discuss mousikē and saw the New Music as a dangerous enterprise with serious consequences for the life of the city and the soul of the citizens. And finally comments from the pseudo-Plutarchian De musica and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae that worked as compilations of (mostly undigested and sometimes misunderstood) quotations from Plato, Aristotle, Aristoxenus, and other music historians, perpetuating hostile comments against the New Music.
These sources do not present the New Music as a movement, but as a series of discrete changes, each attributed to a composer. Suda entries devoted to individual musicians consistently associate them with one invention, and various sources follow the same pattern: Melanippides invented long anabolai (instrumental preludes) and the lament for the Python; Phrynis first mixed hexameter and free meters and created the strobilus that allowed modulations on the cithara; and Agathon introduced tragic embolima (odes that are “thrown in” without any connection to the plot with no responsion between strophe and antistrophe).14 At the heart of this understanding of the changes introduced by the New Music is a passage of Pherecrates’ comedy Chiron (quoted in the De musica) featuring a priamel of New Musicians.15 As Lady Music tells Justice:
Music: “Melanippides started my troubles. He was the first of them: he grabbed me and pulled me down, and loosened me up with his twelve strings. For all that, he was a good enough man to me compared with the troubles I have now. That damned Cinesias of Attica has done me so much damage with the ‘exharmonic’ twists he makes inside the strophes, that in the composition of his dithyrambs you’d mistake the right-hand side for the left, like a reflection in a shield. But still, I could put up with him. Then Phrynis shoved in his own peculiar ‘pine cone’ (strobilus), bending and twisting me into a total wreck – twelve ways of tuning he had in his pentachords. All the same, even he was bearable: he went wrong, but he made up for it later. But Timotheus is another matter. My dear, he’s buried me in a hole and scraped me all away – it’s awful!” Justice: “Who is this Timotheus?” “He’s a red-head from Miletus. The things he did to me were worse than all the others put together, with those perverted ant-crawlings he went in for. And when he found me out for a walk by myself, he untied me and undid me with his twelve strings.”
(trans. Barker)
The changes introduced by the New Musicians are atomized, each of them adding to his predecessor’s debauchery. Innovations are described through sexual innuendo: Melanippides “loosens up” mousikē (making it χαλαρωτέραν, 5—“with a connotation of luxuriousness, lack of discipline”), Phrynis “shoves in” (ἐμβαλών, 14) a strobilus (a modulation mechanism), and Timotheus “unties” (or undresses) her (probably in reference to the breakdown of rhythmic structure).16 Several references to “twelve strings” also exploit the double-entendre of chordai—gut-strings but also gut-sausage (thus phallus). Music’s story follows a clear teleology and the innovations reach, with Timotheus, a climax of horror that announces mousikē’s demise.
More generally, the offensive innovations consist in the introduction of more variety (poikilia) in instrumental practice (through many-stringedness (polychordia) and modulation mechanisms—strobilus for the cithara and rotating collars for the auloi), in harmony (through modulations (metabolai) and other turns (kampai)), and in metrics (polymetria). But if ancient sources condemn and itemize the New Music’s newness, they do not explain it: what caused this series of innovations, why these innovations at this specific time, and is the New Music anything other than a series of changes?
Socio-economic Changes and the Material Cause of the New Music
Only recently has this type of “top-down” approach based on the analysis of surviving fragments in literary sources given way to a different approach. Recent studies have started investigating “from the bottom up” the economic and socio-cultural context that made the New Music possible. In a 2004 landmark article on the “politics of New Music,” Eric Csapo explained how “the rise of the theater in fifth-century BC Athens had a deep impact on the economics and sociology of musical patronage, performance, and spectatorship.”17 The growing magnificence and frequency of public festivals (at least six annual festivals in Attica by the end of the fifth century) where dithyrambs and other theater lyric were performed was the engine of the spread and success of the New Music. Larger theaters entailed changes in the type and volume of sound needed, and in instrumental techniques: the auloi, with their sonic versatility (their poikilia) and ability to project sound, took center stage. The auloi might therefore be called the “material cause” of the new style, as New Musicians pushed the instrument to its technological limits by looking for ever more variety and virtuosity.18 The aulete, “unsung hero of the New Music,” had a particularly important role, not only in leading the performance of dithyramb and dramatic lyric but also as the medium by which exchange of musical ideas and practices between genres (dramatic and non-dramatic) was possible.19 In a form of virtuosic escalation, innovations introduced by the aulos were matched by innovations in cithara practice.20
The importance of the auloi and their role in relation to that of song was discussed in a famous set of fragments preserved by Athenaeus and that took the form of a “debate” between Melanippides and Telestes arguing about the mythological origins of the instrument.21 The dialogue between the two poets (possibly done within dithyrambs led by an aulos) illustrates that the instrument was ideologically charged. The opposition between the wind instrument (with its populist connotations) and the cithara (with its elite connotations) was fully exploited by poets and critics alike.22 One important element of debate involving the instrument was the relationship between logos and music, sense and the senses: because the instrument blocked the mouth and prevented the use of logos, and because it deformed the face by making the cheeks puff out, the aulos was condemned by critics like Plato who saw music as means for the citizen’s education, the soul’s balance, and the city’s improvement.
Csapo’s brilliant analysis ultimately explains how the pipes determined the diction typical of the New Music, and dictated its phonic, syntactic, and semantic choices. With the circular breathing technique used by the aulete, the music came as a continuous flow of sound and was matched by an “agglutinative syntax” that favored long strings of nouns and (often compound) adjectives rather than complex periods—the type of florid diction that critics derided. Moreover, the aulos’ melodic variegation influenced the nature of the song it accompanied: “the poikilia of the verse was directed to the same end as the ‘colors’ of the music: an intoxication appropriate to Dionysiac art.”23 In typical Dionysiac frenzy, the musical element took precedence over logos: Dionysius of Halicarnassus shows how Euripides’ Orestes illustrates a constant in New Music texts—that the melody did not respect linguistic pitch accents (as opposed to traditional practice). Late Euripidean tragedy more generally shows examples of melisms (the assignation of several notes per syllable of text). Overall, the Dionysiac character associated with the music of the pipes transpired in New Music diction and translated as a “flushing of emotions (catharsis) rather than in improvement (mathesis).”24
A New Rhetoric of the New
This type of approach, and especially Csapo’s piece, revolutionized the way critics think about the newness of New Music and evaluate its importance in music history, but it left room for further approaches, in particular, for considering the novelty of the New Music and the discourse on innovation in a larger discourse on, and history of, novelty and innovation across the centuries. Armand D’Angour 2011 The Greeks and the New did just that.25 For D’Angour, what makes the New Music so new is not technical innovations in themselves but the structural changes that made that musical “revolution” possible at all, and ultimately, the kind of rhetoric of the new that the New Music mobilized.
In what could be called a “tradition of innovations,” the New Music builds off a series of past innovations. The end of the sixth-century BC in particular witnessed important changes, introduced by Lasos of Hermione (who “altered the rhythm for the music of the dithyramb and sought multiplicity of notes belonging to the aulos,” [Plut.] De mus. 1141c) and continued by other composers of dithyramb, last but not least of them Pindar.26 Some further changes were mathematically and theoretically initiated, while others made it through in performance and after an initial moment of being new, were widely adopted by audiences. “From the practicing musician’s viewpoint, the features of late fifth-century music were developments of specialist techniques that extended over at least a century to the time of Lasus. The evidence suggests that, rhetoric apart, much of the New Music would have seemed far from revolutionary in terms of technē.”27
But besides technical changes, it is probably the rhetoric of the new that is most different from previous ages. The appeal of songs’ novelty is already documented in the Odyssey, in a passage where Telemachus tells the bard that “people give greater acclaim to the song that comes newest (νεωτάτη) to their ears” (Od. 1.351–352). Many poets rely on this trope, from Pindar contrasting the pleasure of aged wine with that of the “freshest songs” (ὕμνων νεωτέρων, Ol. 9.47–9.49) to Choerilus describing his new project by inverting the metaphor of the “newly-yoked chariot” (νεοζυγὲς ἅρμα, SH 317). Timotheus himself inscribes his innovations in a series of changes and presents his new music as the latest contribution to the Muses’ art. Yet there is something different in his claim and the sphragis of his Persians is a very clear statement about a new understanding of the new. In the poem’s final lines, Timotheus steps out of his narrator’s position and makes a claim about his own contribution:
for Sparta’s great leader, well-born, long-lived, the populace riotous with the flowers of youth, buffets me, blazing hostility, and hounds me with fiery censure on the grounds that I dishonor the older muse with my new songs; but I keep neither young man nor old man nor my peers at a distance from these songs of mine: it is the old defamers of the muse that I fend off, debauchers of songs, uttering the loud shrieks of shrill far-calling criers.
(206–220, trans. Campbell, slightly modified)
The poet presents himself not just as the newest in a series (with his “young” hymns, νέοις ὕμνοις, 211–212) but more radically, as an opponent to the “old defamers of the Muse” (μουσοπαλαιολύμας, 216–217) assimilated to bad practitioners of the art. In an even more provocative statement, Timotheus mobilizes in another fragment (PMG 796) this new rhetoric of the new by relying on the adjective καινός:
I don’t sing the old songs (τὰ παλαιά),
My new (καινά) ones are better.
Now young (νέος) Zeus is king:
In the old days (τὸ πάλαι) Kronos held sway.
Get lost, ancient (παλαιά) Muse!
There is no clearer statement that the novelty claimed by the New Musicians is of a more radical type than ever before, and takes ideological and programmatic connotations. The keyword was not lost on the pseudo-Plutarch, who calls Timotheus, along with poets of his generation, “lovers of innovation” (φιλόκαινοι).28 As D’Angour explains:
Distanced from temporal significations, the attribute of kainotēs holds greater promise of unexpectedness, wonder and salience. It proposes the existence of an intrinsic quality of novelty whereby the new no longer appears to depend on the old, but to oppose it, is no longer bound to yield to age, but brings with it a persistent (and to some observers, alarming) freshness.29
Rather than individual innovations, it is a new outlook on newness and innovation that Timotheus and his colleague claim.
The New Music Framed as Political Threat
This self-advertisement of newness was bound to provoke the conservative elite. And indeed, the elite radicalized the keywords that the New Musicians were flaunting and gave them a very political turn. In Plato’s famous words at Republic 424 a–e, changing the city’s nomoi (its tunes) is changing its nomoi (its laws).30 In particular, the melodic “variegation” of the music and its harmonic “modulations” (metabolai) with their overtones of revolution, as well as the plurality linked to various innovations introduced in instruments and in meter were all taken to be symptoms of, and threats posed by, a radical democracy that conservative critics dreaded and demonized.
We find, in particular, both in Aristophanes and in Plato a powerful rejection of the notion of “mixing” they see as one of the most dangerous features of the New Music and as a symptom of dangerous democracy. In the Frogs, Aristophanes mocks “Euripides” for introducing low genres into high art—“whore songs, drinking songs by Meletos, Carian pipings, dirges and dances” (1301–1303). Plato decries the same loss of purity of generic forms in a passage of the Laws where he describes the New Music as “bringing everything together with everything else,” led only by a concern for listeners’ pleasure (700a–700e).
There is some truth to this view: the New Music was enabled by the social and cultural diversity of its performers (poet-composers and musicians alike, drawn from non-elite, often non-Athenian and even non-Greek background), and by greater economic mobility (musicians in general did not come from the moneyed classes and performed for huge fees—giving rise to a class of professionals). Ultimately this politicization of the New Music resulted in the creation of a historical fiction: the New Music became this effeminate, barbarian, low-class, debauched “other” constructed by the critics, in contrast to the similarly fictional “timeless musical tradition…: manly, very Greek, and noble.”31
A New Poetics
Much scandal was attached to the keywords used by the New Musicians and their critics, but if one focuses on actual surviving poetry, a rather different picture emerges. As Timothy Power has brilliantly shown (2010), and as I have also argued (LeVen 2014), the discourse on innovation and technical change has often obscured the fact that much of the New Music was actually a creative reuse of the poetic past. Alongside the trumpeting of radical newness, there is a careful negotiation between innovative features and reuse of older poetry. Take the description of the sea in Timotheus’ Persians, which mobilizes the kind of exuberant diction that critics, ancient and modern, derided (31–39):
σμαραγδοχαίτας δὲ πόν-
τος ἄλοκα ναΐοις ἐφοι-
νίσσετο σταλά[γμασι
κραυγᾶι βοὰ δὲ [συ]μμι[γ]ὴς κατεῖχεν·
ὁμοῦ δὲ νάϊος στρατός
βάρβαρος ἀμμι[γ᾽ αὖτις]
ἀντεφέρετ’
ἐ[π’ ἰχ]θυ[ο]-
στέφεσι μαρμαροπ[τύχ]οις
κόλποισιν [Ἀμφιτρίτ]ας.
The emerald-haired sea had its furrow reddened by the drops of naval blood, and shouting mingled with screaming prevailed; and together the barbarian naval host was driven back in confusion on the fish-wreathed bosom of Amphitrite with its gleaming folds.
All the features that modern scholars have associated with New Music diction are illustrated here: strings of compound words and profusion of adjectives qualifying the same noun (ἰχθυοστέφεσι μαρμαροπτύχοις, “fish-wreathed [bosom] with its gleaming folds”), mixed metaphors (the personified “emerald-haired sea” (σμαραγδοχαίτας πόντος) has a “furrow” (ἄλοκα)), and daring periphrases (ναΐοις σταλάγμασι, the “naval drops” refers to the wounded sailors’ blood). At first sight, it seems like typical dithyrambic diction, and as Philodemus acknowledges, the difference between Pindar and Philoxenus is not one of style (tropos) but one of ethos (the characters represented).32 The same can be said about Bacchylides and Timotheus (who borrows much from Bacchylides, both in terms of diction and narrative technique).33
But a closer look at the passage reveals that each phrase is a clever and sensitive reuse of Homeric or earlier dithyrambic images.34 Each expression develops a Homeric formula or image: “fish-wreathed” (ἰχθυοστέφεσι) develops the formula πόντον ἰχθυόεντα (“fish-infested sea”) and the “furrows” inverts the Homeric formula ἐπ᾽ ἀτρύγετον πόντον (“upon the infertile plain”). Not just a pastiche of Homeric diction, the passage inverts its terms and through the manipulation of familiar vocabulary provides a quasi-physical appreciation of the situation.35 Examples could be multiplied but more generally, the images that the New Musicians rely on are more than metaphors: they not only make clearer, or more vivid to the mind, they also come with an “aura” that brings with it other connotations, conscious or unconscious, more or less vivid depending on each listener’s imagination.
Another passage, from Timotheus’ Cyclops (PMG 780), makes the point even clearer:
ἔγχευε δ’ ἓν μὲν δέπας κίσσινον μελαίνας
σταγόνος ἀμβρότας ἀφρῶι βρυάζον,
εἴκοσιν δὲ μέτρ’ ἐνέχευ’, ἀνέμισγε
δ’ αἷμα Βακχίου νεορρύτοισιν
δακρύοισι Νυμφᾶν.
And into it he poured one ivy-wood cup of the dark immortal drops, teeming with foam, and then he poured in twenty measures, and so he mingled the blood of the Bacchic god with the fresh-flowing tears of the Nymphs.
The passage displays all the hallmarks of dithyrambic or New Music diction (periphrases, proliferation of adjectives). It also relies on expressions directly borrowed from the Homeric model. Timotheus’ description heightens the sensual elements of the Odyssey 9 passage by condensing more nuances, adding color (black), texture (froth), and movement (drips and trickles) to the Homeric scene. Because μέλας (black) employed here in reference to the wine is, in Homer, used to qualify blood (e.g., Il. 4.149), death (e.g., Il. 2.834), or the spirit of death (e.g., Il. 2.859), sinister connotations transfer to the description of the sympotic experience prepared for the Cyclops. The dense diction overlays networks of signification but because it appeals to the senses, it simultaneously allows the listener to picture the scene more vividly.36
As these two passages suggest, listening to the language of the New Music thus provides an impression of simultaneous déjà-vu and defamiliarization. The vocabulary seems familiar (and might indeed have been heard during the same Panathenaean festival, at a recitation of Homeric epic preceding competitions of other musical genres) but simultaneously very foreign, like seeing a familiar face thousands of miles away from where one would expect it. This mix of closeness and immediacy, and distancing and alienation goes back to the essence of the experience of Dionysus—both god of the dithyramb and god of the theater.
The Experience of New Music
If one had to give a single answer to the question “what was so new about the new music?” it would have to be that the New Music offered a heightened experience of music—multisensorial and scandalously (for some) spectacular. Even though no music has survived, and we can’t clearly fathom what it sounded like on the basis of ancient descriptions, some testimonies give us a sense of the distinctive kind of spectacle it provided for the senses, and fragments can give a sense of the experience it offered to the imagination.
Glam and Ham
“Glam” and “ham” capture important characteristics of the New Music as experience. To set the citharodic or dithyrambic performance in their original context, one has to picture first the theater of Dionysus (or the adjacent Odeon). As the citharode came into the theater to step onto the bēma (podium) from which he would play, everything would mark him as special.37 He would be dressed in a flamboyant skeuē (robe), evocative of Eastern richness and sensuality, and the elaborately decorated golden cithara he played would recall the metal of the gods. This glamorous outfit was viewed as the “appropriately grand, material manifestation of that immaterial, invisible, yet nonetheless rich and powerful possession,” his technē as citharode, which he derived from the divine citharodic archetype, Apollo.38 This “technicolor dream-coat” also “marks the ritualized assumption of this larger-than-life persona in the moment of performance, symbolically mediating the transformation of the performer’s identity from ordinary musician to extraordinary kitharôidos.”39 His persona thus already created in part by his equipment, the citharode would then play an instrumental prelude, an anabolē, both as a way to display his instrumental skills, and to instill a certain atmosphere, again, creating a near-mystical buffer between the song and the real-world context in which it was performed. The instrumental lead-in would then be followed by the prelude (prooimion) to the piece. One such prelude has survived, from Timotheus’ Persians:40
κλεινὸν ἐλευθερίας τεύχων μέγαν Ἑλλάδι κόσμον
Fashioning a famous and great adornment of freedom for Greece
These opening words, with their seemly dactylic rhythms matching the decorous theme of the composition, would complement the authority and charisma of the divine figure (and the weight of the hexameter tradition) with which the citharode was invested as he started on his song.
This sense of spectacle and heightened visual effects was not limited to citharodes. Auletes too were dressed lavishly: Antigeneidas for example wore the Lydianizing krokotos (a yellow gown worn by women) to accompany Philoxenus’ dithyramb the Comast and evoke the glamour of Eastern musicians.41 One can get an idea of the kind of visual spectacle provided by an aulete from the Pronomos vase—an aulete whose performance is described by Pausanias as ἐπαγωγότατα (“most alluring,” 9.12.5–6).42 Much like modern rock-stars, the musician (citharode or aulete) became a figure for fame, allure, and sex-appeal, on whom listeners’ fantasies would crystalize.
As the song got going, there was much opportunity for spectacle and visual effects of various kinds. The whole theme of the Persians for example, a sea battle in narrow straits, allows the poet to capitalize on the spectacular potential of the situation. Toward the beginning of what has survived of the song, Timotheus describes a Persian drowning, thrashing and hurling insults at the sea that is engulfing him (60–81). As we know from “storm scenes” in modern opera, the representation of natural cataclysms provides much opportunity for composers to deploy their talent in the representation of highly dramatic topics—and for performers for their acting stamina. This potential was exploited (probably in an exaggerated way) in Timotheus’ Nauplius (PMG 785) an effect the aulete Dorion dismissed by saying that he had “seen a bigger storm in a kettle.”43
Other preserved fragments reveal the mimetic potential that could be unleashed in certain scenes or associated with subjects that the New Musicians favored: madness (as in the Madness of Ajax, PMG 777), physical trials (the Birthpangs of Semele, PMG 792), or topics with potential for intense emotions (for example mourning females, in Timotheus’ Niobe, PMG 786). This hyper-mimetic, quasi dramatic, style was also illustrated in the dithyramb: Andron of Catane and Cleolas of Thebes were the first auletes to perform somatic gyrations; Aristotle compares tragic actors who overdo their gestures to the “vulgar auletes spinning around if they have to represent a discus or dragging the chorus-leader about if they are playing [Timotheus’] Scylla” and Dio Chrysostom compares somebody tittering over the weight of gold concealed in his clothes with “an aulos-player performing the Birthpangs of Semele.”44 Both citharodic nome and dithyramb thus relied on the mimetic mode of drama, to give direct voice to, and embody, the topic they narrated.45 If the New Music indeed “mixed genres” (as Plato dreaded), it was insofar as it relied on a shared (dithyrambic) language across different genres (tragedy, citharodic nome, and dithyramb) and insofar as it evolved toward a more mimetic type of performance (in speech and gestures) in genres that were usually narrated rather than enacted.
New Music in Action
Besides the sensual appeal of New Music pieces, what can be said about its impact on the imagination? One fragment will give an idea of the kind of mental experience provided by the New Music. It comes at the end of Timotheus’ Persians and describes a panicked Persian who barely speaks Greek, begging for his life (145–149):
and he, embracing his knees, would beseech him, interweaving Greek with his Asian voice, shattering his mouth’s seal in piercing cry, tracking down the Ionian tongue: “How me speak you, and what thing speak? Never again I come back.”
(trans. Campbell, modified)
The thematic focus is remarkable: in a narrative that concentrates on a historical event with high ideological stakes, we find detailed attention to a humble character rather than to grand themes and gnomic pronouncements. More generally, the Persians is a collection of vignettes of individuals—a sailor sinking, a man praying to his native deities, a Persian begging for his life, and a distressed king. This focus on an individual of course provides the potential for impersonation and dramatic mimesis referred to above. At the verbal level, we can recognize the typical linguistic dynamics I have described: the short description mixes several metaphors (hunting, embracing, breaking) and gives an impression of overload for the listener—but a manageable overload, since the images are based on familiar expressions. “Shattering the mouth’s seal” in particular is reminiscent of Homeric expressions for words escaping the barrier of the speaker’s teeth (e.g., Il. 4.350, Od. 19.492) and weaving is a traditional image, from Homer to Pindar, for composing speech (e.g., Pindar Ol. 6.86).
But the passage also illustrates something crucial about the essence of this type of poetry: language is described, in the scene of the supplicating Persian, as something physical, able to escape like a wild animal. In the image of cross-linguistic communication between Persian and Greek, language is pliable but resistant, and seems to have a will of its own. And part of the point of the New Music is both to capture language while showing its wildness—most of the point, actually, is in the hunt. In that respect, the New Music could best be compared with the enterprise of modernist poetry: the songs are a quest in themselves, an event aimed at experiencing language and its reality-altering properties. Here in the passage reproducing the Persian’s broken Greek, the poet pushes language to the limits of sense and explores the border between sensual and semantic, and the potential of linguistic and musical sounds (rather than words) to represent and invoke emotions.46 Ultimately the New Music asks questions about the nature of language itself and the limits of narration, and explores the renewed relationship with the world that poetry and song can provide us with.
Conclusion—New Directions for New Music
Eric Csapo’s 2004 piece “the Politics of the New Music” opened the field of New Music studies and gave rise to a whole scholarly industry. Fifteen years after this flurry of activity, is there still room for more studies? I see three directions new research could productively take.
The first is the relationship between New Music and other late fifth-century BC intellectual projects. A complete intellectual history of the late fifth century still needs to be written. I have pointed out the relationship between the type of language used by the New Musicians and the sophists, and the quest for truth in language, but as David Fearn has started showing, there is more to look into, especially the turn to nomos and physis as explanatory categories, what he calls the “shock of logos” and more generally about the discourse on innovation. We can get glimpses of this in titles like the Argo (the first boat) or Marsyas (the first to have adopted the aulos after Athena rejected it)—and in tragedy, Euripides’ Palamedes (the inventor of writing, dice, etc.). There is a general interest in exploring protoi heurētai (the “original inventors” of given innovations), but more generally an invitation to think about the “opposition between the dazzling and often perplexing charms of the linguistic surface of the text, and the possibilities of narrative absorption.”47
Second, the New Music is most often seen as an episode marking the end of an era rather than the beginning of something else. But what is the legacy of the New Music?48 Did it leave a trace—either in its style, or in the sociology of music? To what extent can it be seen as announcing the Hellenistic age (which also shows a predilection for “writing in the cracks” of Homeric epic and legitimizing innovation through recourse to the past), or some forms (in particular New Comedy, with its focus on individuals)?
Finally, the modern reception history of the New Music is fascinating and virtually unexplored: why does the New Music captures the imagination of scholars at particular points in time? The flourish of publications about Timotheus at the very beginning of the twentieth century corresponded to the major discovery of the Persians’ papyrus, but the scholarly debates and controversies that focalized around the figure of Timotheus betray important aspects of the relationships between French and German scholars in the twentieth century, their aesthetic polemics and scholarly agendas and methods. As for a renewal of interest in New Music in the twenty-first century, exactly a century after the discovery of the papyrus of the Persians, what is it symptomatic of? A postmodernist attraction to a text that questions the status of language? These questions would deserve being examined.
FURTHER READING
The texts of New Music are all edited and translated in Campbell 1993. On the New Music in general, Csapo 2004 (reworked and expanded in Csapo 2011) is fundamental, as is Csapo and Wilson 2009 (on Timotheus). Power 2010 is a monograph on the genre of citharōidia; LeVen 2014 is a book-length study on late-classical lyric, with much emphasis on the New Music.
On Timotheus, Hordern 2002 is a valuable edition with commentary of the fragments, as are Calvié 2010 and Sevieri 2011. On the poetics of Timotheus, Budelmann and LeVen 2014 provide a new (cognitive) approach.
On Euripides and the New Music, Csapo 1999–2000, 2003, 2009, Firinu 2009, Steiner 2011, Weiss 2017. On the “new song” of Trojan Women in particular, Battezzatto 2005a. On new music in the Medea, Thomas 2018. On the influence of Timotheus on Euripides, see Porter 1994: 199–207.
Notes
1 The modern term New Music “consciously or otherwise recalls musica nova, the term used for the styles of Renaissance music that were censured as ‘lascivious and impure’ by the Church at the Council of Trent in 1562” (D’Angour 2006a: 267). Power 2013 on the agonistic nature of the relationship between New Musicians.
2 For references to theater music: Pl. Laws 700a–701d, Arist. Pol. 1342a18, Aristox. frr. 26, 29 da Rios; [Plut.] De mus. 1140d-f, 1142c.
3 On ancient biographical practices, Lefkowitz 2012; Graziosi 2002; Fletcher and Hanink 2016. On the lives of the New Musicians, see LeVen 2016.
4 Suda τ 620.
5 Plut. Agis 10, Apophth. Lac. 220c, Inst. Lac. 238c; also Artemon of Cassandrea, FHG IV.342 ap. Ath. 14.636e. See also the “Spartan Decree” transmitted by Boeth. De inst. mus. 1.1, on which Maas 1992, Prauscello 2009.
6 Macrob. Sat. 5.22. 4s. Diod. Sic. 14.46.6 also calls Timotheus one of “the most distinguished dithyrambic poets” of the early fourth century BC.
7 On reperformances, see testimonies in Hordern 2002. For Arcadia: Polyb. 4.20.8–9, Plut. Philop. II, Paus. 8.50.3; for Crete: CIG 3053.
8 For example Machon, fr. 9 Gow ap. Ath. 8.341a–d, Ath. 8.341e. For an interpretation of anecdotes about Philoxenus, LeVen 2014: 113–149.
9 Antiphanes, fr. 207 PCG ap. Ath. 14.643d-e.
10 On the style of Agathon, Euripides, and other “sophists” mocked by Aristophanes, Worman 2017. On Agathon, Wright 2016: 58–90.
11 See the expression “you make less sense than a dithyramb” (Suda δ 1031). Also Socrates’ interlocutor exclaiming that a word is “dithyrambic” to refer to a long and riddling word (Pl. Cratylus, 409c3).
12 IG II2 3028. Epigraphic sources more generally present a very different scenario from the one preserved through literary sources: they reveal the names of hundreds of artists whose existence is not recorded at all in our surviving witnesses, but whose music constituted the soundtrack of the late fifth century.
13 LeVen 2014: 44–47 for a table with surviving evidence.
14 Arist. Rhet. 1409b, [Plut.] De mus. 1136 c, Procl. Chrest. (ap. Phot. Bib. P. 320b Bekker, v. 160s Henry), Arist. Poet. 1465a29–32.
15 On the passage, see Dobrov and Urios-Aparisi 1995, Pöhlmann 2011, Lynch 2018.
16 Barker 1984: 236–237.
17 Csapo 2004: 208.
18 Csapo 2004: 217 (inverted commas his).
19 Csapo 2004: 211 for the expression.
20 Power 2013.
21 PMG 758 ap. Ath. 14.616e and PMG 805 ap. Ath. 14.616f–617a.
22 Martin 2003, Wilson 1999, 2004.
23 Csapo 2004: 227.
24 Arist. Pol. 1341b11–12, on which Csapo 2004: 226.
25 D’Angour 2006a, 2011.
26 See Wallace 2003 on the late-sixth/early fifth-century aulos revolution; Prauscello 2012 on Pindaric innovations.
27 D’Angour 2006a: 276.
28 [Plut.] De mus. 1135c. Also Antiphanes fr. 207 PCG, ap. Ath. 14.643d), where Philoxenus is said to use “new (καινά) words of his own invention everywhere.”
29 D’Angour 2011: 226–227.
30 A similar pun on nomos as law/musical genre is used by Timotheus in the final line of the Persians (240), where he wishes upon the city in which the Persians is performed eunomia that is, good government, or good musical performance of nome.
31 For example Aristoxenus, frr. 26, 28, 29 da Rios. Csapo 2004: 230.
32 Philodemus Mus. 1.23 (IX 67 fr. 5).
33 Fearn 2019.
34 LeVen 2014: 179–180.
35 Fearn 2019 goes further and productively suggests: “ultimately, Timotheus is posing questions about the nature of the sea, and the extent to which lyric diction can help to articulate its essence, whether an elemental substance, a divinity, or perhaps both at once.”
36 For a related argument about the manageability of what seems the difficult language of New Music, see Budelmann and LeVen 2014, who take a cognitive approach.
37 Herington 1985 suggests that the artist’s entrance was surrounded by silence but ancient sources (e.g., Pl. Rep. 492b–c) attest that audience members manifested approval or censure in a noisy way (through thorubos).
38 Power 2010: 18.
39 Power 2010: 24 and 25 for quotation.
40 PMG 788 = Plut. Philop. 11. Plutarch who relates the anecdote that the singer Pylades was performing the prelude underlines the ὄγκος (conspicuous majesty) of the poetry.
41 PMG 825 = Suda; Snyder 1974.
42 Taplin and Wyles 2010 on the Pronomos vase.
43 Hegesander, FHG IV 416 ap. Ath. 8.338a.
44 Thphr. Fr. 92 Wimmer; Stephanis 1988: 50, 262. Csapo 2004: 214 for testimonies. Arist. Poetics 26.1461b30–32 = PMG 793; Dio Chrys. Orations 78.32.
45 Some nomes and dithyrambs are actually called “drama” : see Σ Ar. Plut. 290c g Chantry; Zenob. 5.45. Philoxenus is also said to have introduced melē, arias for solo singers, in his dithyrambic chorus ([Plut.] De mus. 1142a).
46 On New Music poets imitating any sound (winds and hails, and pulleys and axles and cries of animals), see Plato Rep. 397a. On the passage, see also Gurd 2016: 120–122.
47 Fearn 2019.
48 Prauscello 2011 considers “Callimachus and the New Music.”