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official action taken to curb the originality of contemporary music. Song and dance, he maintained, entailed particular commotions of the soul and thus set up particular patterns in it, mirroring their own qualities, shaping a boy's unformed character or bringing out latent traits in those of maturer years.79 Boys should be taught to sing and play melodies characterized by manliness, self-control, and even-handedness.80 Damon set out a series of modal scales, not merely listing them by name but enumerating their notes and intervals and commenting on their qualities.81 He did likewise with rhythms and tempi, commending some, condemning others as expressive of undignified aggression, frenzy, or other vices.82 Here numerical ratios played a part in his theory, so that a Pythagorean influence may perhaps be suspected.83 |
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The author of a diatribe composed perhaps around 390 BC, the beginning of which is preserved on papyrus, attacks certain harmonikoi who claim that different melodies can make men self-controlled, sensible, righteous, manly, or the opposite of all these.84 The list of qualities corresponds closely to those of which Damon spoke; but he must have been dead many years by this time. |
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79 Ath. 628c, Aristid. Quint. p. 80.25ff. = Diels, Vorsokr. 37 B 6-7. Similarly in 1926 the Salvation Army in Cincinnati raised its voice in protest at the prospect 'that babies born in the maternity hospital are to be legally subjected to the implanting of jazz emotions by such enforced propinquity to a theatre and jazz palace' (New York Times, 4 Feb. 1926, quoted by Merriam 242). That jazz was evil and corrupting was a widely held conviction in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was actually banned in some places; see Merriam 241-4. 'After the dissemination of jazz,' wrote Cyril Scott, '. . . a very marked decline in sexual morals became noticeable' (quoted by N. Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (Seattle, 2nd edn. 1969), 25). |
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80 Philod. Mus. pp. 54f. Kemke = 116 van Krevelen, cf. p. 7 K. = 14 Kr. = 115 Rispoli; Diels, Vorsokr. 37 B 4; Wilamowitz, Griechische Verskunst, 63 f. |
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81 Aristid. Quint. loc. cit., 'in the harmoniai handed down by him one finds that, of the movable notes, it is sometimes the female ones and sometimes the male that predominate or are included to a lesser extent or not at all'. Female and male = lower and higher, cf. p. 77. 19. It is not clear whether these are Damon's terms or only Aristides', but they would suit Damon's concern with manliness. We can hardly doubt that these heterogeneous scales of Damon's are identical with the six that Aristides elsewhere adduces from 'the most ancient' sources (above, p. 174). especially as he adds that those are the ones Plato refers to in Resp, 398e-399c. See below. |
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82 PI. Resp. 400a-c; Diels, Vorsokr. 37 B 9; see above, p. 243. |
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83 Schol. Pi. Alc. i 118c (p. 95 Greene) connects Damon through a succession of teacher-pupil relationships with Pythoclides, an aulete of the earlier 5th c., here said to be a Pythagorean. |
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84PHib. 13, translated with notes in Barker, GMW i. 183-5; improved text in ZPE 92 (1992). 16f. A plausible case has recently been made for identifying the author as Alcidamas: A. Brancacci in A. Brancacci et al., Aristoxenica, Menandrea, Fragmenta Philosophica (Accad. Toscana, Studi xci, 1988), 61-84. |
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