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24 Anon. Bellerm. 98: falling thirds to tonic. |
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27 Ibid. 101: falling to tonic from fourth and third above. |
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28 Ibid. 104: fall from fifth to third above tonic. |
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30 POsl. 1413, 15: falling fourth from tonic. |
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32 PMichigan 2958, 5: octave drop. 6: falling thirds. 16: falling fifth. |
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40 Berlin Paean: descending to tonic. |
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51 POxy. 1786: rocking descent from tonic to fourth below. |
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The type of close where there is a fall from the tonic to the fourth below (a e, a f e, etc.) has an exotic sound to our ears, but parallels can be cited from modern folk music of the Balkans.5 In origin it is perhaps the formalization of a natural drop of the voice as the pressure is taken off. |
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Greek melody in general has a sinuous, writhing character. From the figures cited earlier it will be seen that if you take any two consecutive notes, four times out of five they will be different. Just occasionally the music seems to become stuck on one note for two or three bars,6 but for the most part it is in constant, restless motion. There is little repetition of phrases; the composers seem to be always finding new paths through their scales, though I suspect that if we had more extended fragments from the Classical period we should see less of this variety and more that looked formulaic. There are signs of it in the two scraps that we have from Euripides (3-4), where we observe repeated playing on the notes of the enharmonic pyknon. In the Orestes fragment the sequence f  e appears twice, besides e  f e  d e and f  f; in the Iphigeneia fragment  e three times, besides f e and f e. We may suppose that this was typical of music in the enharmonic genus with the divided semitone. In the later diatonic texts we notice here and there what seem to be melodic clichés. Attention will be drawn to them as appropriate when we come to study the texts. |
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Tonal stability and modulation |
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The citharody of Terpander's time and up to the age of Phrynis remained quite simple in style. For anciently it was not considered legitimate to do as |
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5 Cf. Manuel Bryennius, Harm. 3. 5 p. 324 Jonker (classification of melodies into those that end on the initial/tonic note and those that end a fourth below); C. Sachs, Musik des Altertums (Breslau, 1924), 63; B. Bartók, Volksmusik der Rumänen yon Maramures, Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft 4 (1923), xvi and nos. 53c, 69, 70a; S. Baud-Bovy, Essai sur la chanson populaire grecque, 9 (a klephtic song from Parnassus). |
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6 Cf. above, n. 2. |
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