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the listeners out of their minds and setting their feet tapping to the rhythm.105 But it can also fill the soul with calm if it is played soberly and sweetly.106 The expert aulete can provide whatever is wanted: he can assuage grief, enhance joy, inflame the lover, exalt the devout.107 |
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The vase-painters often give an indication of the effort required to blow the two pipes, by showing the player's cheeks bulging; we have mentioned the use of a device for relieving the cheek muscles of some of this strain. When the instrument fell out of favour in certain Athenian circles in the second half of the fifth century, the tale was invented that Athena herself had thrown it away after she realized how it distorted her features.108 But there were some who were able to blow strongly while maintaining facial composure.109 Such was the famous Theban Pronomus, who charmed audiences exceedingly by his facial expression and the whole movement of his body as he played.110 |
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This use of body movement to add expressiveness to the performance is said to have been started by a Sicilian aulete, Andron of Catana, and then to have been taken up by Cleolas of Thebes. It was evidently common in the fourth century. Aristotle speaks disparagingly of hack players who roll about if there is reference to a discus, or grab at the chorus-leader if the music is depicting the monster Scylla, as if the audience would not otherwise get the point.111 As with the kithara, this was an age of showmanship. |
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We do not know whether Greek pipers employed the technique known as circular breathing, whereby the player breathes in through the nose while continuing to expel air from the reservoir in his mouth and is thus able to sustain an unbroken stream of sound. This is practised by the launeddas-players of Sardinia and the reed-pipers of the Near East, as well as by some Western instrumentalists.112 It may perhaps have been known in Antiquity as an Arab accomplishment, since the Greeks had a proverbial expression 'an Arabian aulete', applicable to people who chattered on without ever paus- |
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105Subl. 39. 2. |
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106 Plut. Quaest. conv. 713a. |
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107 Philostr. VA 5. 21. 2-3. Cf. Plut. Quaest. conv. 657a; above, pp. 31, 33. |
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108 Melanippides, PMG 758, contradicted by Telestes, PMG 805. Alcibiades is also said to have rejected the aulos for this among other reasons (Plut. Alc. 2. 5). |
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109 Poll. 4. 68-9, cf. Philostr. VA 5. 21. 4. |
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110 See Pl. 27; Paus. 9. 12. 6. |
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111 Theophr. fr. 92 W.; Xen. Symp. 6. 4; Arist. Poet. 1461b30. So too in a later age, Epiphanius, Panarion 25. 4. 10 (i. 272 Holl). |
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112 Sachs, HMI 91, 248. |
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