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Voice and instrument. Heterophony |
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It is convenient for singers if they can take their first note from an instrument already in play. The Homeric bard played some preliminary bars on his phorminx before embarking on his song. Pindar, addressing the lyre, speaks of its prelude serving as signal and guide to dancers and singers. Such a prelude was called anabole, and the corresponding verb anaballomai was used from early times for playing it.33 Pipers too played an introduction before the singer or chorus joined in. In the later fifth-century dithyramb the instrumental prelude became something quite elaborate and fantasy-like.34 |
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Melanippides, one of the leading writers of these dithyrambs, is said to have composed anabolai instead of antistrophes.35 This must mean that he made the dithyramb non-strophic, through-composed, and divided it into sections by means of instrumental interludes, which the term anabole is here extended to cover. In later vocal scores too we occasionally meet a line or two of purely instrumental music in the middle.36 |
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During the singing the accompanying instrument's main role was to duplicate the vocal melody.37 But sometimes it played some divergent notes as well. Plato deprecates |
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heterophony and lyre-embroidery, when the strings give out one melody and the composer of the song another, and when people combine close with open texture, fast with slow, high with low in parallel, and likewise when they impose all sorts of rhythmic decoration on the notes of the lyre.38 |
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This sounds like quite an elaborate and busy sort of accompaniment, with the lyre putting in crowds of extra notes. |
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(Footnote continued from previous page) |
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ments. For Bryennius kompismos is the instrumental equivalent of melismos, and teretismos the same when voice and instrument sound together. |
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33Od. 1. 155, 8. 266 with schol. and Eust., 17. 261-3; Pind. Pyth 1.3 with schol., cf. schol. Nem. 7. 114d, Etym. Magn. 80. 22; JHS 101 (1981), 122. Another word was endosirnon (Hsch.). |
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34 Eup. fr. 81, Ar. Pax 830, Av. 1385. |
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35 Arist. Rh. 1409b25. |
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369 PVindob. G 13763/1494, 32 PMichigan 2958. Late sources call such insertions mesaulika, mesaulia, or kola (Aristid. Quint. p. 23.21, Anon. Bellerm. 68; cf. Barker, GMW ii. 435 n. 160: Psell. De trag. 9, Eust. Il. 862.19) See also above, p. 67, on citharodes' strumming in the intervals of their songs. |
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37 See p. 67 with n. 85. |
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38Leg. 812 de; see Barker's notes, GMW i. 163. |
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