4. Music and the Dance

The word mousike among the Greeks meant originally any devotion to any Muse. Plato’s Academy was called a Museion or Museum—i.e., a place dedicated to the Muses and the many cultural pursuits which they patronized; the Museum at Alexandria was a university of literary and scientific activity, not a collection of museum pieces. In the narrower and modern sense music was at least as popular among the Greeks as it is among ourselves today. In Arcadia all freemen studied music to the age of thirty; everyone knew some instrument; and to be unable to sing was accounted a disgrace.⁶⁵ Lyric poetry was so named because, in Greece, it was composed to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, the harp, or the flute. The poet usually wrote the music as well as the words, and sang his own songs; to be a lyric poet in ancient Greece was far more difficult than to compose, as poets do today, verses for silent and solitary reading. Before the sixth century there was hardly any Greek literature divorced from music. Education and letters, as well as religion and war, were bound up with music: martial airs played an important part in military training, and nearly all instruction of the memory was through verse. By the eighth century Greek music was already old, with hundreds of varieties and forms.

The instruments were simple, and were based, like our vaster armory of sound, upon percussion, wind, or strings. The first class were not popular. The flute was favored at Athens until Alcibiades, laughing at his music master’s inflated cheeks, refused to play so ridiculous an instrument, and set a fashion against it among Athenian youth. (Besides, said the Athenians, the Boeotians surpassed them with the flute, which branded the art as a vulgar one.⁶⁶) The simple flute, or aulos, was a tube of cane or bored wood with a detachable mouthpiece and from two to seven finger holes into which movable stopples might be inserted to modify the pitch. Some players used the double flute—a “masculine” or bass flute in the right hand and a “feminine” or treble flute in the left, both held to the mouth by a strap around the cheeks, and played in simple harmony. By attaching the flute to a distensible bag the Greeks made a bagpipe; by uniting several graduated flutes they made a syrinx, or Pipe of Pan; by extending and opening the end, and closing the finger holes, they made a salpinx, or trumpet.⁶⁷ Flute music, says Pausanias,⁶⁸ was usually gloomy, and was always used in dirges or elegies; but the auletridai—the flute-playing geisha girls of Greece—do not seem to have purveyed gloom. String music was confined to plucking the strings with finger or plectrum; bowing was unknown.⁶⁹ The lyre, phorminx, or kithara were essentially alike—four or more strings of sheep gut stretched over a bridge across a resonant body of metal or tortoise shell. The kithara was a small harp, used for accompanying narrative poetry; the lyre was like a guitar, and was chosen to accompany lyric poetry and songs.

The Greeks told many strange tales of how the gods—Hermes, Apollo, Athena—had invented these instruments; how Apollo had pitted his lyre against the pipes and flutes of Marsyas (a priest of the Phrygian goddess Cybele), had won—unfairly, as Marsyas thought—by adding his voice to the instrument, and had topped the performance by having poor Marsyas flayed alive: so legend personified the conquest of the flute by the lyre. Prettier stories were told of ancient musicians who had established or developed the musical art: of Olympus, Marsyas’ pupil, who, towards 730, invented the enharmonic scale;* of Linus, Heracles’ teacher, who invented Greek musical notation and established some of the “modes”;⁷⁰ of Orpheus, Thracian priest of Dionysus; and of his pupil Musaeus, who said that “song is a sweet thing to mortals.”⁷¹ These tales reflect the probable fact that Greek music derived its forms from Lydia, Phrygia, and Thrace.*⁷²

Song entered into almost every phase of Greek life. There were dithyrambs for Dionysus, paeans for Apollo, hymns for any god; there were enkomia, or songs of praise, for rich men, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for athletes; there were symposiaka, skolia, erotika, hymenaioi, elegiai,and threnoi for dining, drinking, loving, marrying, mourning, and burying; herdsmen had their bukolika, reapers their lityerses, vinedressers their epilenia, spinners their iouloi, weavers their elinoi.⁷⁷ And then as now, presumably, the man in the market or the club, the lady in the home and the woman of the streets, sang songs not quite as learned as Simonides’; vulgar music and polite music have come down distantly together through the centuries.

The highest form of music, in the belief and practice of the Greeks, was choral singing; to this they gave the philosophical depth, the structural complexity, the emotional range, which in modern music tend to find place in the concerto or the symphony. Any festival—a harvest, a victory, a marriage, a holyday—might be celebrated with a chorus; and now and then cities and groups would organize great contests in choral song. The performance was in most cases prepared far in advance: a composer was appointed to write the words and music, a rich man was persuaded to pay the expense, professional singers were engaged, and the chorus was carefully trained. All the singers sang the same note, as in the music of the Greek Church today; there was no “part song” except that in later centuries the accompaniment was played a fifth above or below the voice, or ran counter to it; this is as near as the Greeks seem to have come to harmony and counterpoint.⁷⁸

The dance in its highest development was woven into one art with choral singing, just as many forms and terms of modern music were once associated with the dance;* and dancing rivaled music in age and popularity among the Greeks. Lucian, unable to trace its earthly beginnings, sought the origins of the dance in the regular motions of the stars.⁸⁰ Homer tells us not only of the dancing floor made by Daedalus for Ariadne, but of an expert dancer among the Greek warriors at Troy, Meriones, who, dancing while he fought, could never be found by any lance.⁸¹ Plato describedor chests, or dancing, as “the instinctive desire to explain words by gestures of the entire body”—which is rather a description of certain modern languages; Aristotle better defined the dance as “an imitation of actions, characters, and passions by means of postures and rhythmical movements.”⁸² Socrates himself danced, and praised the art as giving health to every part of the body;⁸³ he meant, of course, Greek dancing.

For the Greek dance was quite different from ours. Though in some of its forms it may have served as a sexual stimulant, it rarely brought men into physical contact with women. It was an artistic exercise rather than a walking embrace, and, like the Oriental dance, it used arms and hands as much as legs and feet.⁸⁴ Its forms were as varied as the types of poetry and song; ancient authorities listed two hundred.⁸⁵ There were religious dances, as among the Dionysiac devotees; there were athletic dances, like Sparta’s Gymnopedia, or Festival of Naked Youth; there were martial dances, like the Pyrrhic, taught to children as part of military drill; there was the stately hyporchema, a choral hymn or play performed by two choirs of which one alternately sang or danced while the other danced or sang; there were folk dances for every major event of life and every season or festival of the year. And as for everything else, there were dance contests, usually involving choral song.

All these arts—lyric poetry, song, instrumental music, and the dancewere closely allied in early Greece, and formed in many ways one art. As time went on, and already in the seventh century, specialization and professionalism set in. The rhapsodes abandoned song for recitation, and separated narrative verse from music.⁸⁶ Archilochus sang his lyrics without accompaniment,⁸⁷ and began that long degeneration which at last reduced poetry to a fallen angel silent and confined. The choral dance broke up into singing without dancing, and dancing without singing; for, as Lucian put it, “The violent exercise caused shortness of breath, and the song suffered for it.”⁸⁸ In like manner there appeared musicians who played without singing, and won the applause of devotees by their precise and rapid execution of quarter tones.⁸⁹ Some famous musicians, then as now, engrossed the receipts; Amoebeus, harpist and singer, received a talent ($6000) each time that he performed.⁹⁰ The common player, doubtless, lived from hand to mouth, for the musician, like other artists, belongs to a profession that has had the honor of starving in every generation.

The highest repute went to those who, like Terpander, Arion, Alcman, or Stesichorus, were skilled in all forms, and wove choral song, instrumental music, and the dance into a complex and harmonious whole probably more profoundly beautiful and satisfying than the operas and orchestras of today. The most famous of these masters was Arion. About him the Greeks told the tale how, on a voyage from Taras to Corinth, the sailors stole his money, and then gave him a choice between being stabbed to death or drowned. Having sung a final song, he dived into the sea, and was carried on the back of a dolphin (perhaps his harp) to the shore. It was he who, chiefly at Corinth and towards the close of the seventh century, transformed the inebriated singers of impromptu Dionysiac dithyrambs into a sober and trained “cycle” chorus of fifty voices, singing in strophe and antistrophe, with arias and recitatives as in our oratorios. The theme was usually the suffering and death of Dionysus; and in honor of the god’s traditional attendants the chorus was dressed in goatlike satyr guise. Out of this, in fact and name, came the tragic theater of the Greeks.