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present excerpts made by or for musicians, not complete texts of the plays in question. |
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Again, when writers such as Glaucus of Rhegium or Aristoxenus make observations about the music of Olympus, Terpander, Sappho, Stesichorus, etc., we should not imagine that there was a written tradition of this music. There was a tradition, but it was oral. In the fourth century there were still many opportunities of hearing older songs and instrumental tunes, just as today most Englishmen, whether or not they can read music, and irrespective of interest in 'classical' music, are familiar with Greensleeves, God Save the King/ Queen, Rule Britannia, Clementine, and dozens of other songs that are at least a century old. |
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Aristoxenus, as we have seen, regards the notation of music as unimportant, something practised by 'the so-called harmonikoi' either from simple incomprehension of the true aims of harmonic science or as a concession to laymen, to give them something visible to grasp.45 He might have made some use of notation in giving examples of intervals, as is done in some of the late treatises, but he nowhere does so. He also mentions the existence of metrical notation, and takes a similarly scornful view of its significance for theoretical inquiry. |
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Given that the man who can notate the iambic metre does not necessarily know what the iambic is, and likewise with melody, the man who writes out the notes of the Phrygian melody does not necessarily know what the Phrygian melody is, obviously notation cannot be the goal of the science in question.46 |
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At a later period there is some evidence for rhythmic and melodic notation as (separate) subjects studied in Ionian high schools. An inscription from Teos honouring prizewinners lists rhythmographia and melographia among other musical and literary accomplishments, and melographia also appears on a similar list from Magnesia on the Maeander.47 Whether these were compulsory subjects we cannot tell. But these inscriptions do show that in the high Hellenistic age, at least in Ionia, a knowledge of musical notation could be |
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45Harm. 2.39-40. |
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46Harm. 2.39. |
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47 C. Michel, Recueil d'inscriptions grecques (Brussels, 1900). no. 913 = CIG 3088 (c. 200 BC): SIG 960 (2nd c. BC); differently interpreted by H. I. Marrou, Ant. Class. 15 (1946), 289-96. The word for instrumental notation is kroumatographia (Anon. Bellerm. 11 = 93). |
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