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reported of another Sicyonian performer, who perhaps belongs in the early fifth century: |
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Lysander the Sicyonian citharist made the first changes in solo playing, by prolonging the duration of the notes and giving body to the tone; and in enaulos kitharisis, which Epigonus' circle was the first to use. He ended the brevity that prevailed among psilocitharists, being the first to play fine shades of colour, and iamboi, and octave echoes, the so-called 'whistling' effect (syrigmos). He was the first to change instrument (?), and to make it a bigger affair by surrounding himself with a chorus.58 |
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Lasus wrote the first book about music. He is cited as subscribing to the same notion of pitch as Epigonus' school, and as having studied the ratios underlying concords.59 He was more widely remembered as a practising musician. There was a self-consciously intellectual element in his compositions. In two of them he excluded any word containing the letter s, apparently because he felt that it did not go well with the sound of the aulos.60 One of these songs began |
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Of Demeter I sing, and the Maiden, Klymenos' consort,
raising a hymn of honey cry
in the deep-resounding Aeolian attunement, |
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which is something like saying 'let us praise the Lord with one voice in G major'. Alcman and Stesichorus had mentioned the 'Phrygian melody' in passing, but to Lasus it is evidently important to draw people's attention to his use of a new or uncommon mode, or at any rate to raise their consciousness regarding the identification of modes. Similar technical references appear in Pratinas and Pindar, no doubt following Lasus' lead. Both mention the Aeolian mode, and nobody else does. To argue from Heraclides Ponticus' identification of it with Hypodorian, it may have had a scale something like d e f a d'.61 Pratinas commends it as somehow a mean between tense and slack modes, and he describes its use metaphorically as 'turning over a fallow field', which implies that it had lain unexploited or under-exploited. This tends to confirm Lasus' originality in adopting it. |
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58 Philochorus loc. cit. The significance of iamboi in this context is unclear. On Lysander cf. A. Barker, CQ 32 (1982), 266-9; Winnington-Ingram in Gentili-Pretagostini, 255. |
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59 See pp. 225, 234. On Lasus generally see G. A. Privitera, Laso di Ermione (Rome, 1965). |
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60 See pp. 39f. |
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61 See pp. 183f. |
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