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considered to have a place in general education, as the practice of music had always had. The occasional publication of song texts on stone, notes and all, might suggest that some passers-by, at least, could be expected to be able to read the melody. And the number of papyri with musical notes, though very small in comparison with the number of lyric and dramatic papyri without notes, is now more than a handful, and it continues to grow. |
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It remains nevertheless unlikely that reading music was an attainment of more than a small minority. When Dionysius of Halicarnassus decides to illustrate from Euripides the absence of correspondence between musical and speech melody, he cites the first bit of song in the most often performed of tragedies, Orestes: it was surely from hearing it in the theatre that he was able to refer to it, not from consulting a score. He describes the relationship of the melody to the word accents laboriously in terms of higher, lower, or equal pitches. It would have been shorter and more precise to use musical notation if he had understood it and been able to count on his readers' understanding it.48 Quintilian advises that the budding orator should study music, but that he will not have time to go into it so thoroughly as to learn to sing from a score.49 The humorous epigrammatist Lucillius compares a boxer's manifold scars to the 'oblique and upright Lydian and Phrygian letters of the lyricists'; musical notation is here conceived as a peculiar form of writing, familiar in general appearance but to most people indecipherable.50 |
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Of the later writers on music, Cleonides, Theon of Smyrna, Ptolemy, Porphyry, and Nicomachus make no use of notation, whereas Aristides Quintilianus, Gaudentius, Alypius, Bacchius, and the Anonymus Bellermanni all do; most of them set out tables of the notes belonging to each key, though these have largely fallen away in the manuscript tradition. This latter group of writers are perhaps all later in date than the former group, and it looks as if a new fashion set in, in the third century, for including in harmonic and other musical treatises the notation tables which had previously enjoyed a more limited, independent circulation.51 |
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Gaudentius speaks of the notation as something used by the |
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48Comp. 63f. |
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49Inst. 1.10. 1-33; 1.12. 14. |
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50Anth. Pal. 11. 78 (generally mispunctuated). |
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51 They were apparently known as Tropika, i.e. tables of tropoi (= tonoi, keys): 'Marius Victorinus' (Aphthonius) Gramm. Lat. vi. 183.23. The earliest reference to them is in Varro, fr. 282 p. 304 Funaioli. He mentions that the Hyperlydian key was shown at the top and the Hypodorian at the bottom. |
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