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that they took over something of Minoan musical style together with Minoan instruments; they may have employed Minoan musicians at their festivities. However, according to the author of a wide-ranging survey of primitive music, |
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Even when two races of different culture are in constant economic or military contact there is little evidence that they adopt each other's musical forms . . . Even when foreign musical instruments are adopted, the relevant literature seems to be taken over only to a small extent or in mutilated form.1 |
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The Mycenaeans continued to sing in certain traditional rhythms and verse-forms inherited from their Indo-European past, as we can infer from the survival of these rhythms and forms, only somewhat modified, in Classical times.2 |
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The Minoan-Mycenaean lyre normally had seven or eight strings. As the strings were of equal length, it is unlikely that they would be tuned to cover a wider compass than an octave or so. Their number then implies a hexatonic or heptatonic scale or set of scales. |
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After the Mycenaean period, however, between about 1100 and 700 BC, lyres are regularly represented with only three or four strings. If we accept that this is what they had, it suggests a more restrained style of singing that used a smaller compass, perhaps not more than a fifth. |
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One type of singing that continued throughout these centuries (though perhaps not in all parts of Greece) was the performance of epic poetry. In the eighth century, at any rate, it was accompanied by the lyre. Study of the most archaic elements in the Homeric language leads to the conclusion that there was an unbroken tradition of heroic epic in dactylic hexameters from the fourteenth century or before. The technique of its performance, like that of its composition, is likely to have been highly conservative. I have said something about it on p. 208. I believe that the epic singer used a limited scale of three or four notes (at a guess, perhaps a b c' e', tone + fourth, with b as the focus), and disposed his syllables over them with regard both to the word accents and to a repeating melodic scheme. |
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There were, naturally, many other types of song. Homer mentions paeans, laments for the dead, wedding songs, a song of the vintage, singing at the loom, singing drinkers, girls' choruses that sing and dance, a healing incantation. In one passage a singer performs an |
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1 M. Schneider in E. Wellesz (ed.), Ancient and Oriental Music, 29. |
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2 Above, p. 147 with the literature cited in n. 52. |
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