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of things that to them are elementary. They may occasionally find that their learning is a treacherous light. Some, for instance, who are familiar with the terms chromatic and enharmonic as they are used in connection with Western music will be unprepared for the fact that they mean something different in Greek. And some who are sure they know what the Dorian or the Lydian mode is may be disconcerted to discover that in Antiquity it was nothing of the kind. |
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Apart from petty snares like these, there is a general danger of coming to ancient Greek music with preconceptions formed by Western musical culture. Some nineteenth-century investigators fell prey to such preconceptions to a degree that looks grotesque from this distance. Can we do better? Yes, we can; in particular, because of the great advances made by ethnomusicology in the present century, and the general widening of musical horizons. The concert-going or radio-listening public nowadays wanders in a landscape that extends not from Bach to Brahms but from Gregorian chant to gamelan and gagaku. Ancient Greek music is not part of our local, West European, post-Renaissance tradition, but it is part of world music, and it needs to be seen in ethnological perspective. Musical instruments and melodic styles have histories that extend over millennia and across geographical zones far larger than the territories of a single nation. At various points it will be appropriate to refer to comparative material from the ancient Near East or from more recent musical cultures in the Balkans, Africa, or elsewhere. There may even be mention of 'primitive' music, which I hope will be taken in the right spirit. It is not a question of setting the Greeks on the level of what used to be called 'savages'. The fact is that their music is better understood by putting it in the broad category of ethnic music, extending down to the most primitive and limited manifestations of the melodic instinct, than by looking in it for the workings of supposedly natural and universal principles which are actually abstracted from German music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as was once the approach.6 |
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6 From the writings of Rudolph Westphal: (1)'The rhythm of ancient music is so essentially one with the rhythm of modern composers that without detailed knowledge of the rhythmic forms used by these, and in particular without detailed appreciation of the rhythms of the great J. S. Bach, the necessary parallels were lacking which alone enabled the material transmitted by the Greek rhythmicians to be correctly understood' (Die Musik des griechischen Alterthumes nach den alten Quellen neu bearbeitet (Leipzig, 1883), 5). (2) 'The Greeks' non-diatonic music that admits intervals smaller than a semitone, which are wholly foreign to the modern art, will probably, alas, remain for ever an enigma to scholarship' (Griechtsche Harmonik und Melopoeie, 3rd edn. (Leipzig, 1886), ix). |
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