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Imagine, if someone sang or played the most beautiful melody but paid no heed to the rhythm, is it conceivable that anyone would tolerate such music-making?4
We can claim knowledge of the rhythms of ancient music because there is good reason to believe that they are reflected with reasonable fidelity in the metres of those verse texts which we know to have been sung (and in many cases danced). The metres are quantitative, based on patterns of long and short syllables which must correspond to patterns of long and short notes. The repetitive nature of these patterns usually makes their rhythmical character obvious; and when we find them built up into extended complex sequences which are repeated entire from one strophe to another, this can only be understood as a discipline imposed by the rhythm of music that was itself repeated. As A.M. Dale puts it, 'every Greek poet was his own composer, and no poet would write words in elaborate metrical schemes merely to annihilate and overlay these by a different musical rhythm'.5 In the surviving fragments of poetic texts furnished with musical notation, the note values are commonly left unspecified, and this is because they were felt to be sufficiently indicated by the metre of the words. When they are specified, they confirm the presumption that short syllables are set on short notes and long syllables on long notes.
It was a feature of the ancient Greek language that the distinction between short and long syllables was clear-cut. All verse metre was based on this binary opposition, whether it was spoken verse or sung. Even in prose oratory the interplay of long and short syllables automatically yielded rhythmic patterns, which the orator was advised to be careful about; the inadvertent production of a verse occasionally aroused the audience to jocularity.6 It was only natural that this opposition of long and short, being built into the words themselves, should be maintained in vocal music. And as a general rule it remained a binary opposition, between two note values of which one had twice the duration of the other. The evidence for this is of several kinds:
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4 Dion. Hal. Dem. 48 (i. 233. 19 U.-R.); cf. Comp. 56 (ii. 39. 13), 'I have observed the same thing happening with regard to rhythmeveryone complaining and being discontented if somebody played an instrument or danced or sang in uneven time and destroyed the rhythm.'
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5Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1969), 161.
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6 Cf. the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edn., s.v. Prose-rhythm (W. H. Shewring and K. J. Dover).

 
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