2
There’s more than one way to make music. There is singing, of course: singing is one of the central forms of making music pretty much anywhere music is made. And the Greeks did a lot of it. In fact, almost all of what we think of as Greek ‘poetry’ was actually meant to be sung in one way or another. Homer’s poems, though they eventually got written down, were originally chanted from memory along a fairly simple, sing-song melody. Poets like Sappho, Alcaeus, and Timotheus are called ‘lyric’ poets because their poems were intended to be sung with accompaniment on the lyre. Dithyrambs, epinicians, and other choral songs were meant to be sung as well, and the great tragedians like Aeschylus and Euripides wrote words that were meant to be intoned aloud or sung. Those of us who love these poets today almost always read their work in books – we may read them in Greek or in translation, but we treat them as if they were meant to be ink on a page. In fact, though, from Homer’s day all the way up through the Classical period, poetry was primarily intended to be heard, not seen.
But the Greeks also had a colourful array of different instruments – or as they called them, ‘tools’ (organa) – for producing a range of different sounds. And the choice of instrument – which tools to use, in what way, and for what purpose – was more than just an aesthetic judgement for ancient Greek artists. This is easy to understand by comparison with modern instruments: when somebody says that she studies classical piano, and has done for ten years, it’s likely to elicit quite a different reaction from the one someone else will get when she says she plays electric bass in a garage band. Playing either of those instruments comes with a range of different social and cultural associations. Many people may think of the classical pianist as a dedicated, cultured aesthete. By contrast, at the mention of a bass guitarist, one might conjure up an image of ripped jeans, greasy hair, and long afternoons spent smoking substances whose names I won’t mention here.
These stereotypes can be completely mistaken: plenty of people who play the electric guitar are also fluent speakers of French whose afternoons are spent in chaste reflection upon the nature of virtue. But the most prominent bass guitarists in popular culture are guys with tattoos and names like ‘Flea’ (from the band known as the Red Hot Chili Peppers). Whereas classical pianists tend to show up to their gigs in evening gowns or tuxedoes. And so the fact remains that, for better or for worse, different instruments come with different cultural baggage because of the way they’ve traditionally been used.
So, too, in ancient Greece. As we get to know the instruments which were in use during the Classical period, we’ll also develop a sense of some major trends and prejudices in Athenian society. Two styles of instrument will be particularly important: strings and pipes.
Strings
We can see paintings of typical Greek stringed instruments on vase paintings like the one shown here. They were made of a hollow structure called a ‘soundbox’ much like the body of a guitar. Over this soundbox were stretched strings made of animal gut or sinew, which were tied to a wooden bar (called a ‘yoke,’ zugon). The bar, in turn, rested on two wooden arms (pēcheis, singular pēchus), sometimes also called ‘horns’ (kerata).
This kind of instrument is often referred to as a ‘lyre’ (from the Greek word lura – plural lurai). Technically, though, among the later commentators who gave each instrument an official name, the word lura was used to designate only one of many possible forms this instrument could take. A lura was perhaps the most straightforward, basic of these forms, often having a soundbox made of tortoiseshell – hence a lura could also be called a chelus, which means ‘tortoise’ in Greek.
Fig. 1 Terracotta amphora (vase) attributed to the Berlin Painter, featuring a kitharode with his instrument. Image courtesy of the Met Museum, New York, NY.
One story went that the resourceful trickster god Hermes had invented the lyre out of necessity in an attempt to charm his older siblings.1 It had a sophisticated, genteel mythological pedigree and was considered just the right kind of thing for the moneyed aristocracy to play. That’s because it seemed elegant enough for the gentry, but not so elaborate and complex that it suggested an over-developed enthusiasm for music – which would have been beneath a true gentleman.
Real pros, though, played the much more elaborate kithara (plural kitharai). Eventually, that word would be adopted in Spanish as guitarra, which is where we get our English word ‘guitar.’ But the Greek kithara, though it shares some features with the modern guitar, was a different instrument altogether – far more ornate and elaborate, as the vase painting in Fig. 1 shows.
The kithara was what you played if you were serious about strings. Terpander, the legendary great whom we met in the previous chapter, played the kithara. So did later performers like Timotheus of Miletus in the late 400s and early 300s BC, as well as mythological heroes of music such as Orpheus, whose playing was said to have moved even stones and trees with its emotional power. The god Apollo, too, who presided over the highest forms of musical art, was often depicted wielding the kithara in popular portrayals.
Most kitharai had seven strings, but that was far from a given – those who wanted to experiment with more complicated melodies and modulations sometimes added strings on as a way of making more ornate runs of notes possible. People used to tell a story about how Terpander added more strings to his kithara and got scolded by Spartan authorities who wanted to keep things simple and old fashioned.2 This is probably a tall or at least an exaggerated tale, because it’s almost identical to another story that was told about Timotheus – only this time, Timotheus was supposed to have added a ninth string, and the Spartan leaders were so appalled that they demanded he cut two strings off.3 But even though they’re apocryphal, these anecdotes tell us something: musical instruments and the sounds they could or couldn’t make carried huge cultural significance. Toying with the accepted makes and models could get you accused of corrupting the traditions of the ancients for the sake of flashy gimmicks.
These sorts of accusations are pretty much a constant in the history of music. When the electric guitar was invented in the 1920s and 1930s, it raised some eyebrows among traditionalists. And the acoustic guitar itself got panned as an amateur’s plaything back in in the seventeenth century: ‘the guitar is no more than a cowbell, so easy to play … that there is no stable boy who is not a musician on the guitar.’ So wrote the Spanish critic Sebastián de Covarrubias in a 1611 dictionary, complaining that the really substantive instrument, the lute, was being abandoned for a cheap trinket. Now, of course, acoustic guitars are perfectly respectable and even celebrated as quite appropriate for classical music by the likes of J.S. Bach and Fernando Sor – which just goes to show that these sorts of judgements are, in many cases, only a matter of time.
Similarly, different stringed instruments in ancient Greece meant different things to different generations. In the fifth century BC, the kithara meant showmanship and professionalism. But in earlier eras, the Homeric bards used a simpler instrument with a semi-circular soundbox, often called the phorminx (plural phorminges). Among professionals, as phorminges fell out of use, kitharai, with their square soundboxes and ornate curved arms, came more and more into vogue.
The barbitos, meanwhile, had more elongated strings and arms than the kithara, chelus, and phorminx. The barbitos therefore played with a deeper resonance, and it was portrayed differently than the more gentlemanly chelus or the more elaborate kithara. In myths, the barbitos was often placed in the hands of satyrs – rampaging goat-men with insatiable sex drives – and of those who worshipped the god of wine and chaos, Dionysus. It could therefore be connected in the public imagination to raucous partying, but it also had a history of being used by some of Greece’s most celebrated musicians – I mentioned in the last chapter that Terpander himself was said to have invented the barbitos after hearing something similar used at a Lydian drinking party. It was said to have been favoured by Sappho, too, and other notables of the Archaic period like Alcaeus.
The barbitos, then, is a great example of how an instrument’s connotations and cultural resonance can shift over time and depending on context. It’s possible, given the myth about Terpander, that the barbitos came to Greece from somewhere in the East. And it may well have been a party instrument, or at least something to be played at the boozy but sophisticated social gatherings known as symposia, which we’ll cover more in the next chapter. Those symposia were at once laid-back, wine-soaked affairs, and erudite, elite social gatherings. Over time, the most famous sympotic performers of one generation became the cultural legends of the next, so that what may have begun as carousing and drinking became celebrated high culture. Usually the barbitos was associated with eroticism of some kind, and the Greeks were never at ease with it as a staple of elite society. But in the popular consciousness, it was an instrument of many meanings – whether it was imagined in the hands of a drunken satyr, or associated with the elegant verses of Sappho, could depend upon whom you asked and when.
Pipes
Perhaps even more culturally fraught and complex in their public image were the auloi, the ‘pipes’ (singular aulos). This, the most popular wind instrument in ancient Greece, consisted of two pipes, played simultaneously by one musician. The pipes were often made of wood, although they could also be made of such things as bone, horn, metal, or clay. Each of the two pipes had a reed (Greek glōssa or zeugos) that would vibrate to produce sound when blown into correctly. The reed led into two sections of tubing called the holmos and hypholmion, which in turn led into the body (bombyx) of the pipe. This body had holes (trēmata or trypēmata) on its side which could be covered with the fingers to produce different notes.
Sometimes both auloi in a pair were the same length, but often one aulos was longer and so played lower notes than the other. Some similar instruments still exist in modern times – notably the Launeddas, a traditional Sardinian instrument consisting of three pipes. Based on studying the Launeddas and other multi-pipe instruments, some scholars (notably Armand D’Angour of Oxford) have inferred that the longer, lower-pitched aulos would have been used to play long, sustained notes while the other, shorter aulos played the melody. That’s a highly plausible theory, but there are others as well, and what very little written notation we have for the auloi doesn’t record enough specifics to tell us for sure. The two pipes may also have moved in tandem or passed the melody off from one to the other – different modern performers have tested out different theories, and the YouTube links at the end of this chapter give some examples of the variety in their work.
Vase paintings and written sources both depict aulos-players (auletes) with big, puffed-out cheeks a lot like the American jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. When Dizzy really got wailing, his face ballooned into a distinctive wide-eyed, round-cheeked stare that became his trademark. Auletes were known for making much the same face – probably because they practised a technique called circular breathing, which involves inhaling through the nose while still expelling air from the cheeks so the player never has to stop playing (compare the image on the cover of this book, which is Roman but includes a pipe-player with the characteristic puffed-out cheeks). Many auletes also used a leather strap called the phorbeia as a halter to keep the pipes in place and support the cheeks while they kept the music going.
There was a famous myth which told of how Athena, dignified goddess of wisdom and war, invented the auloi but then disposed of them because puffing out her cheeks to play them made her look ugly.4 That’s a classic example of how some of the more censorious critics of Greek high society in the fifth and fourth centuries BC thought of the auloi: crass, indecorous, and unsuitable for elite society. Even the kithara, which was regarded with ambivalence by those who found its professionalism troublesome, counted as more respectable than the frightfully vulgar auloi for such moralists as Plato, who insisted that the sound of the pipes would not even be heard in the ideal city of his Republic.5
As noted already, though, Plato is far from the whole story. In fact, in disapproving of the auloi, he was quite unusual – at any rate he was avowedly more concerned with his theories of how the world should be than with the realities of how it actually was. His unease, first and foremost, was with emotionalism: his student Aristotle also characterized the auloi as capable of expressing and inspiring tremendously profound emotions of fear, grief, ecstasy, delight, and everything in between.6 Though Aristotle was more lax than Plato about these sorts of things, both were cautious about the intensity of feeling that auloi could produce: Plato worried that the theatres encouraged Athenians to hunt after pure musical enjoyment at the expense of more refined artistic pleasures, and Aristotle called pipe music ‘more for parties than for edification’ (the Greek word he used was orgiastikos – suitable for wild revelry).7
But behind these rather sniffy comments we can get a sense for how beloved the pipes must have been. If critics like Plato and Aristotle had to devote time and energy to running them down, auloi must have exerted a considerable sway over the heart and imagination of the average Athenian. We can hear that anxiety behind Aristotle’s warning that pipe playing encourages an unhealthy fixation with music for the sake of music, and that it encourages irrationality (since players couldn’t speak while playing the pipes, some philosophers worried that their music was devoid of the kind of sophisticated thought that came with verbal argumentation). It almost seems as if these theorists were antsy about posh young boys jamming on the pipes while they ought to be devoting themselves to serious pursuits like rhetoric and logic.
And in fact, many poets and artists – often more down-to-earth or at least more free-spirited than philosophers – celebrated the auloi enthusiastically for precisely those powers of expression and emotion that made Plato nervous. For instance: Telestes of Selinus, who was known for his dithyrambs and won prizes with them in the late fifth century BC, was said to have refused to believe that Athena would ever throw away such a magnificent instrument as the auloi.8
So auloi were not, in fact, the unremittingly lowbrow noisemakers that Plato might have liked us to believe they were. True, they were featured prominently at rowdy drinking parties, and in dithyramb, which was usually composed and performed to worship Dionysus. Like Cybele, the mother-goddess of Phrygia whose cult made its way through Anatolia into eastern Greece, Dionysus was often honoured with frenzied dancing and ecstatic music on the pipes. But the powerful feelings inspired by aulos music were also employed to great effect at all levels of Greek society: in the high art of tragedy, for example, in sombre rituals such as funerals, and at sporting events. The compelling emotional tenor and versatility of the auloi, so threatening to the imagined world order of utopian theorists, was likely also exactly what made them such a welcome accompaniment in the lively day-to-day of actual Athens.
In fact, though, it’s hard to be certain what the ‘average bloke’ would have thought, because it was the rarefied gentry who wrote things down. That’s a problem with any study of ancient history – or modern history, for that matter. The further back one goes in time, the higher percentage chance there is that the lower classes won’t have had the resources or the education to write or read extensively. A large portion of what survives from ancient Athens – whether it be pro-aulos, anti-aulos, or anything in between – is quite specialized and erudite scholarly commentary meant to be shared among small circles within the upper crust.
Granted, those circles contained very influential people, and by and large the writers of the Greek gentry were not trying to deceive their readers: they were representing and discussing the attitudes of the citizenry, and especially the upper classes, as they saw them. But what we don’t get from such sources is a really fine-grained sense of how slaves, or the uneducated, or even most women of any social class, would have thought about music. It’s important to keep that in mind: whenever we think about the ancient world, we’re only getting part of the picture. It’s especially a problem with respect to music, which often lives and breathes among the common folks and not the upper crust. The snobbery directed at the auloi in our extant sources definitely reflects a real cultural attitude, but it almost certainly muffles the immense excitement and energy with which auletes would have been met by their crowds of adoring fans.
After all, there were competitions in aulos-playing all over Greece, and there’s no indication that they went over less well than the kithara contests. Dithyrambic contests were featured in the Great Dionysia, the yearly festival where tragedies were performed in Athens, in the illustrious Panathenaia, and in a number of other smaller festivals on the outskirts of town. As mentioned already, these festivals were massive civic events packed with people from all over the city and its suburbs – the energy at them must have been electrifying. Not even the most disdainful critic was able to stop the electric or acoustic guitar from catching on in its day – the auloi were no different.
The real thing
Our information about how pipes and strings were perceived comes from written sources – poets and critics commenting on how they saw the world of musical culture. Some of our knowledge about how the instruments themselves were constructed comes from imagery like the ones painted on vases which we saw earlier in this chapter. But we have another source of information when it comes to ancient instruments: we have the real things. No kitharai have yet been found, but archaeologists have uncovered some battered remains of auloi which help tell us a lot about how things worked.
One of the most important surviving pipes is the ‘Louvre Aulos,’ so called because it can now be found at the Louvre museum in Paris (listed under inventory number E10962). No one knows exactly how old it is, but it likely is Egyptian and comes from a community of ancient Greeks who lived in that part of the world and brought much of their cultural practice with them. The pipes are marvellously, improbably well-preserved – they are made of an African wood which the Greeks called lōtos, meaning that by all accounts they shouldn’t have survived as well as they have. It’s hugely helpful that they did, because one of the many things they let us do is confirm our understanding of the Greek scale. By measuring the distance between finger-holes, scholars can determine which notes the instrument is designed to play, and calculate the intervals which would have been available to auletes working with a pipe like this one.
It turns out that the scale played by the Louvre Aulos spans an octave and plus a fourth, and the notes available are those of what theorists called the ‘Greater Perfect System.’ This is a technical name for a sequence of notes, centred around an octave scale, which theorists used as something like the basic outline of a standard scale. This theory will be covered in more detail in Chapter 7. For now it suffices to say that the Greater Perfect System was structured in a way not unlike our modern Western scale, but including some smaller intervals (that is, some notes closer together in pitch) than most of our modern instruments are capable of playing.
By stopping up different holes with his fingers, an aulete could shorten the column of air vibrating inside the pipe just the way recorder-players do with their instruments. A shorter column means a higher note, so fingering one’s way along the pipe meant walking up the scale. But there was more that an aulete could do than just play a basic scale, of course. By covering the holes only partially, or by adjusting the positioning of his mouth on the reed (a technique called ‘embouchure’ in modern terminology), the player could bend the pitch up and down. This allowed for the delicate shifts in pitch that would distinguish between the different ‘shades’ or types of scale known as chromatic, enharmonic, and diatonic (more on these, too, in Chapter 7). Players could also ‘overblow’ (a blowing technique which produces higher pitches than the basic ones normally available to the instrument), and they could keep some holes permanently plugged with wax, especially if their pipes had more holes than their hands had fingers (i.e. more than five – the Louvre aulos pipes, for example, have seven and nine holes, respectively). For a more technologically advanced solution, a device called a ‘collar’ (Greek syrinx) could be used to close off certain holes without the use of fingers, freeing up the hands and giving access to a greater number of notes.
The Louvre Aulos isn’t the only one to survive. The one pictured here is housed at Reading University – it’s made of wood, but covered with bronze and decorated with silver, giving an example of how variable the construction of the instruments could be. Another set of pipes was uncovered in 1996 within a fourth-century BC tomb in the Macedonian port city of Pydna, on the northwestern coast of the Aegean Sea. Using these ancient remains as guides, some creative scholars have ventured into making reconstructed models, often going to great lengths to obtain authentic materials. One such scholar-artist, Barnaby Brown, has had deer knucklebones flown in from Scotland and stripped of flesh using acid to recreate the holmos as closely as possible. Barnaby’s adventures, and those of his colleagues, are described on the Workshop of Dionysus blog (see the url below).
Fig. 2 An aulos, of uncertain provenance, housed at the University of Reading. Wood covered in bronze with silver decoration.
This is an excellent example of how texts, archaeological study, and practical experience can reinforce one another. The study of ancient music is dynamic, and it challenges researchers to think outside the box. Because so much of music is a felt thing and only imperfectly captured in words, scholars can’t simply read theory to understand how it works. They also have to get their hands on what they can by way of practical materials, exploring and experimenting with the kinds of sounds it’s possible to make. The traditional methods of studying the ancient world – combing through written texts, for example, and digging up physical remains – have to be combined with more creative and artistic work, to check theory against a felt sense of musical artistry (and vice versa).
Strike up the band
Auloi aren’t the only kinds of instruments that have been discovered. In 1981, in the Athenian district of Daphne, a fifth-century BC gravesite was revealed to house a musician and some fragmentary shards of his harp. The Greek harp (psaltērion) may originally have come from Lydia, although there are a number of examples preserved in Egypt. It was a triangular wooden frame with many more strings than the kithara (some of the Egyptian instruments have twenty-one altogether). Vase paintings and written sources show that there were all kinds of harps in ancient Greece, but none of them was considered quintessentially ‘Greek’ – whether from Lydia or elsewhere, the harp had an air of ‘foreignness’ about it. Our evidence is a little too scarce, though, to say much more than that.
There was also a range of wind instruments beyond the auloi, the best known of which is probably the syrinx. A syrinx was a row of reed pipes aligned next to one another in order of increasing length. This was a simple instrument, first used by shepherds in the 2000s BC on the Cycladic islands southeast of mainland Greece. Cycladic culture is ancient even by Greek standards, and in the urbane society of Classical Athens the syrinx pipe seemed like a quaint holdover from a simpler time. Some people refer to the syrinx by the name of ‘pan-pipes,’ because of the ancient myth of its original creation. The story went that Syrinx was once the name of a beautiful young woodland spirit, a nymph, who vowed that she would never marry or make love. The lusty god Pan – half goat, half human, and always on the prowl – tried to force himself on Syrinx. When she prayed for deliverance, Zeus turned her into the marshy reeds which Pan used to make the first pan-pipes.9
There were percussion instruments, too: cymbals (Greek kymbala), tambourines (tympana), and a large kind of castanet held in the hand and clapped together (the krotala). Eventually (in the third century BC), an adventurous inventor named Ctesibius, working in the bustling intellectual hub of Egypt’s Alexandria, even invented something like an organ, the hydraulis. By manipulating air and water pressure using a sophisticated system of levers, hydraulis players could force air through a series of pipes to generate a powerful, piercing sound.10 And there were plenty of other musical contraptions besides, many of which don’t survive at all except for their names. The aulos and the kithara were always at the centre of the Greek musical world, but around them was arrayed a whole orchestra of backup instruments for various occasions, each with its own specific history, legends, and cultural connotations.
And they came from all over the place. The barbitos and the harp may have come from Lydia or perhaps Egypt. Most Greek historians and poets considered the aulos to have been invented in Phrygia, another district of Asia Minor. Whether or not these attributions are exactly correct, they testify to an awareness among ancient Greek musicians that they shared a common heritage with the artists of the Near East. In fact, there was probably a great deal of back-and-forth cultural exchange going on throughout the 1000s BC, resulting not only in the adoption of Eastern instruments by Greek players but the reverse as well – an outwards exportation of Greek models into the East and beyond.
World music
Greece and Mesopotamia certainly shared one crucially important instrumental practice: they ordered their strings in the same way.
In modern music, we think of the most important note in a scale (the ‘tonic’) as the bottom note: that’s the note around which a traditionally harmonized song will gravitate and to which it will probably return by the end of its melody. In Greek music, though, this central note really was central: it was the one played on the middle of the kithara’s seven strings. Hence it was called not the ‘tonic’ but the mesē, a Greek word meaning ‘middle.’
The other notes in the scale were named and tuned according to their relationship with that central note. In the modern system, scale notes have names and functions beginning from the tonic and walking upwards: after the tonic (1st) come the supertonic (2nd), the mediant (3rd), the subdominant (4th), the dominant (5th), the submediant (6th), and the leading tone (7th), each with its own particular role to play in the melody. Greek had an analogous set of names for the notes of its scale: the seven central notes of the scale are called hypatē, parhypatē, lichanos, mesē, paramesē, paranētē, and nētē. These names refer to the physical position of each string on the instrument: hypatē (‘highest’) is the string which would have been highest above mesē in a standard lyre, while nētē (‘lowest’) would have been lowest beneath it. Somewhat confusingly, the notes themselves actually went from high to low in pitch as the strings went from low to high. Like a guitar, a lyre was normally held horizontally with its lowest-sounding string highest up: so hypatē, for instance, was called ‘highest’ because it was played on the string positioned highest on the instrument, but in fact it was the lowest note of the scale in pitch. Similarly, nētē was the highest note, and so on.
This distinctive method of tuning is the same one implied by the oldest written tune in known existence, mentioned at the very beginning of this book. These ‘Hurrian hymns’ come from the Levantine town of Ugarit in what is now Syria. The notation of the hymns assigns a role to each note according to which string would have played it and its relation to the middle string – just like the Greek system. This is how we know that Greeks and Syrians were tuning their instruments in the same way as early as the 1400s BC. That particular practice probably made its way into the Aegean from Mesopotamia in a trend known as ‘East-West cultural drift.’ But the exchange also went the other way from time to time. For example, sculptures and reliefs from the Levant often depict the use of a kinnāru, an Eastern stringed instrument with a distinctive flat base. But eventually, cultures in Levantine cities such as Ashdod seem to have adopted a round-based lyre, which can only have come from the early Greek cultures in the Aegean. This might have happened around 1200 BC, when the great Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age seem to have collapsed and sent the nobility of the Greek islands eastwards to places like Ashdod. The kithara and the aulos were distinctively Greek instruments, but they were both known to have taken shape long before the fifth century in dialogue with other cultures from around the world.
Greek instruments also outlasted both Athens and the fifth century. We’ve already noted one distant echo of the kithara that still survives today: our word ‘guitar,’ which is derived from the Greek word through French and Spanish. This small linguistic tribute bears witness to the fact that when early modern musicians in Europe developed their own tradition of stringed instrumentation, they did so in a tradition that went back to ancient Greece.
But the aulos lasted too, especially in Italy. In fact, the image on this book’s cover, though it depicts a distinctly Greek-looking set of pipes, is from a Roman sculpture on one of Rome’s major roads, the Via Appia. The Latin word for aulos is tibia (plural tibiae), and it was among the most popular instruments in Rome.
For example, in Pompeii, the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius froze an entire city in time in 79 AD. The ash of Vesuvius hardened and caked over the remains of countless artefacts from daily life – including four complete tibia pipes. These pipes are technically elaborate and certainly made for professional use – some of them have as many as fifteen finger-holes. So players would certainly have used rotating collars in addition to their fingers to manipulate the pitch. But at heart, the Pompeii tibiae are basically Greek: they follow much the same model as Greek auloi, and their holes are spaced to play the scales developed by Greek theory.
Much of the Athenian musical tradition would probably have been handed on to the Roman Empire by Greek slaves and emigrants. But Roman conquerors would have also found some Greek pipes ready-made in Italy as they travelled across the peninsula. Just north of Naples in Poseidonia (now Paestum), for example, archaeologists have unearthed a pair of pipes from around 480 BC, about 200 years before the Romans took over.
Poseidonia was one of many Greek colonies in Southern Italy, and since about the sixth century BC it had been occupied by settlers as part of what is called Magna Graecia (Latin for ‘Big Greece’) – a swath of Italian land where adventurous Greeks in the Archaic period often landed after setting out from their original homes in search of wider territory. Magna Graecia became a place where the customs and traditions of Greek culture were partially exported into what would eventually become Roman territory. During the Classical period, as Greek ideas and art continued to make their way westward, musical practices were also swept up in this tide of trade between the original Greece and her offshoot colonies. That meant that when the Romans took over in the Hellenistic period, they found Greek music – and instruments like the auloi – waiting for them to make their own.
All of this raises an interesting question: what is Greek music anyway? If the instruments that Athens loved came at least in part from Egypt and the Levant, and if they found their way far out beyond the borders of the city as time went on, was there even anything about it that was distinctly Greek, let alone Athenian?
To some extent, the answer is simple: Athenian music was Athenian because it was performed in Athens. Much of what we know about ancient music comes from sources outside of the city. But because Athens set itself up as the place to be in the Mediterranean for arts and culture during the fifth century, it became a site where crucial interchange and development happened that made Greek instruments – and the songs they played – visible for posterity. The thought of Lasus and Damon, the songs of Timotheus and Euripides – these have connections and origins in places all over the world, but it was in Athens that they bumped up against one another and made their most enduring marks on cultural history. Even those artists and thinkers from this period whose work doesn’t survive in written form did much to shape that of others who did leave written records.
And so being a nexus of social and intellectual interaction didn’t just make Athens into a hodgepodge grab-bag of random people and musical ideas. Athens in the fifth century was a hothouse, where musical practice and theory rubbed against one another to make something distinctive and new. The radical tunings developed in the late 400s BC, the alterations and additions to the structure of kitharai and auloi that corresponded to those developments, and the fractious debate within urbane Athenian society about how those changes ought to be regarded, endorsed, or forbidden: all of these together made up a magnetically attractive local culture which has fascinated and influenced later musicians ever since.
The Roman poet Horace, who lived in the first century BC under the reign of Julius Caesar’s heir, Augustus, wrote in one of his poems that ‘conquered Greece conquered her savage captor.’11 By this he meant that even though Rome became politically dominant, the cultural practices of Greece and especially Athens were so mesmerizing that Roman high society became fixated on and addicted to Greek ways of life. The Romans weren’t the only ones. Melodies, tuning practices, and instruments from Greece endured long past their respective heydays and changed the game in all sorts of ways, not least when it came to the strings and the double-pipes. From their origins in the Cyclades and Lydia, to their transformative ascendancy in Classical Athens, to their dissemination to the Roman Empire and around the world, Greek music made itself heard long after its instruments fell silent.
Some further reading
There are plenty of images, videos, and how-to’s concerning the reconstruction of ancient instruments (auloi especially) on the ‘Workshop of Dionysus’ blog: http://www.doublepipes.info/.
Volume I of Andrew Barker’s Greek Musical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, subtitled The Musician and His Art) contains some very helpful diagrams, explanations, and illustrations of Greek instruments in the introduction. So does Martin West’s classic Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Also useful for stringed instruments is Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece by Martha Maas and Jane McIntosh Snyder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
The politics and symbolism attached to different Greek instruments is an issue that has attracted a lot of scholarly attention – two central treatments are ‘The Politics of the New Music’ by Eric Csapo (in Music and the Muses, edited by Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 207–48) and Timothy Powers’s The Culture of Kitharoidia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Also enjoyable and informative is Robert R. Wallace’s ‘An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music’ in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (volume 101, 2003, pp. 73–92).
John Franklin will cover the instrumental exchange between East and West in his contribution to Blackwell’s Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music.
For those interested in learning more about the hydraulis (and the history of organs more generally), there’s a very detailed diagram and explanation in ‘Early History of the Organ’ by Willi Apel in the journal Speculum (volume 23, number 2, 1984, pp. 191–216). In 2002, Dr. Richard Pettigrew of the University of Oregon gave a detailed interview on the topic, which can be found at this link: https://www.archaeologychannel.org/audio-main-menu-cat/audio-interviews/307-about-the-ancient-hydraulis.