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Cinesias is, of all these musicians, the one most commonly satirized in comedy. But that is probably because he was the only Athenian among them; the others were men from overseas who came and went. He was the son of a painfully bad citharode called Meles, who was still about in 420. He himself was a nervous, spindly, sickly creature, whose career spans roughly the period 425-390. In Aristophanes' Birds he is characterized by his airy-fairy, high-flown style, and there is reference to his anabolai. Pherecrates speaks of him as 'making exharmonic bends in his strophes', so that his dithyrambs appear the wrong way round.12 |
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No specific innovation is attributed to Cinesias, and later writers do not acknowledge him as one of the important figures in the development of music. They have more to say of one Crexus, who is nowhere mentioned in the remains of Attic comedy and whose home town is not recorded. He is named in two passages of pseudo-Plutarch which are probably drawn from Aristoxenus. The first is a survey of innovative composers. The older ones, including Terpander, Polymnestus, Thaietas, Sakadas, Alcman, and Stesichorus, all adhered to noble standards of beauty, |
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but Crexus and Timotheus and Philoxenus and the composers of that generation have become more vulgar and devoted to novelty in their pursuit of what is now called personable and prize-quality (?); limitation to a smaller number of notes and simplicity and dignity in music has come to be old-fashioned. |
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In the other passage Crexus is credited with introducing into dithyramb a form of combination of singing with instrumentally accompanied spoken delivery, which Archilochus and the tragedians had previously employed; and with the invention of hetero-phonic accompaniment to vocal music.13 The Stoic Diogenes of Seleucia cited a composition of Crexus as an example of poetry gaining much in impressiveness from its musical setting.14 |
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12 At. Av. 1372-409, cf. Ran. 1438; Pherecr. ft. 155.8-13, cf. Düring (as above, n. 4), 182-6, and E. K. Borthwick, Hermes 96 (1968), 63-7. Cinesias may well be targeted among others in the unspecified references to dithyrambists at Ar. Nub. 333-8 (cf. schol.) and Pax 829-31. Here too there are anabolai and airy-fairy language. |
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13 Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1135c, 1141 a. The references to heterophony in older music (above, p. 206) apparently concern aulos pieces alone. |
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14 Philod. Mus. 4 x pp. 49f. Neub., SVF iii. 227.32. |
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