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variety. Ion of Chios, in his poem addressed to the kithara that is now equipped with eleven strings, says |
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Formerly Greeks all plucked you at seven pitches,
two tetrachords (?), raising a scanty Muse, |
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and in similar vein someone in Aristophanes, praising the modern music, says of it |
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not like they sang originally, seven-note, all alike.3 |
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Multiplicity of chordai (strings or notes), besides exharmonic 'bends', is a prominent theme in a passage quoted from Pherecrates' comedy Chiron, where the dishevelled figure of Music complains to Justice of the progressively more outrageous treatment she has suffered in recent times from Melanippides, Cinesias, Phrynis, and Timotheus. At two or three points she speaks of 'twelve chordai', though the number should probably not be taken too literally. 'A dozen' may be a better rendering.4 |
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These ruffians were all either composers of dithyramb or citharodes; Timotheus was both. Tragedians such as Agathon and Euripides, though influenced by the new music, are never numbered among its pioneers. It is the dithyrambist Melanippides of Melos that Pherecrates' Music identifies as the first to misuse her. He came from a family of musicians; his maternal grandfather, also called Melanippides, won a dithyrambic victory at Athens in 493, and his father Criton too is described as a poet. He himself was active perhaps from about 440 to about 415.5 |
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One crucial innovation attributed to him is the substitution of anabolai for antistrophes. As a musical term, anabole usually signifies an instrumental preface to a vocal performance.6 If it replaces an antistrophe, it becomes an intermezzo; and a dithyramb deprived of antistrophes is presumably one without responsion, |
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3 Ion fr. 32.3-4; Ar. fr. 467. Cf. the criticism of Aeschylus' music as 'always the same' (Ran. 1250). |
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4 Pherecr. fr. 155. On 'twelve' as a round number see I. Düring, Eranos 43 (1945), 181f. |
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5 The main sources regarding Melanippides and the other musicians to be discussed in this section are most conveniently collected in J. M. Edmonds's Lyra Graeca, iii (Loeb, 1927). See also the relevant articles in RE, mostly by Paul Maas. |
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6 See p. 205. |
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