|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ethos.65 Now, was this a fully worked out composition that did not change from one performance to another, or rather a melodic programme within which each performer had a certain freedom to create something individual? We certainly get the impression that 'he played the nome of Athena' would have conveyed more precise information than 'he played a mazurka'. On the other hand it seems likely that it was rather less precise than 'he played Chopin's opus 30 no. 1'. When the competing auletes at Delphi played the Pythikos nomos, they surely had some freedom to vary it and to interpret the story using musical phrases and gestures of their own, at shorter or greater length.66 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
At Athens it was the citharodes who were the great display musicians, and nomos came to be used especially of their compositions. In this way it came to denote a literary genre.67 It is this kind of nomos, in its fourth-century form, that we must understand when a Peripatetic writer says that nomoi are astrophic; and when Aristides Quintilianus declares that the nomic style of melody tends to high notes, the dithyrambic to middle ones, the tragic to low ones; and when Proclus speaks of the orderly grandeur of the nomos and its penchant for the Lydian mode.68 Failure to distinguish between contexts where nomos does and does not have this generic status has been the source of much confusion.69 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
65 Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1143bc. Cf. PI. Cra. 417e. The account of the rhythms suggests something like dactylo-epitrite. Schol. Eur. Or. 1384 identifies the nomos of Athena with the harmateios ('chariot') nomos; and the harmateios nomos is associated with dactylic rhythm and said to have served as a model to Stesichorus (Glaucus fr. 2 ap. ps.-Plut. De. mus. 1133f). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
66 Prescriptive modal-melodic structures in other cultures, especially the ragas of Indian music, provide suggestive analogies, but cannot be gone into here. See NG xii. 422 ff. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
67 Ar. Ran. 1282, Pl. Leg. 700b, 799e. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
68 Ps.-Arist. Pr. 19. 15 (cf. above, n. 59), Aristid. Quint. p. 30. 2 (cf. 23. 3), Procl. ap. Phot. Bibl. 320b. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
69 On nomos as a musical term see W. Vetter, RE xvii. 840-3; H. Grieser, Nomos: ein Beitrag zur griechischen Musikgeschichte (Diss. Heidelberg, 1937); E. Laroche, Histoire de la racine NEM-en grec ancien (Paris, 1949), 166-71; T. J. Fleming, CJ 72 (1977), 222-33. |
|
|
|
|
|