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pursuit for an enlightened manexcept perhaps when he was drinking and having a little fun.113 |
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Songs that are popular in the society in which one moves are easily picked up without formal instruction. Playing an instrument is more difficult. It may sometimes happen that someone who happens to have an instrument available can master its technique just by playing with it, but normally some tuition is necessary. The great majority of those who played in ancient Greece will have learned from someone else. Informal tuition from a friend, a relative, or a benevolent expert might be available at any time. In the Archaic period this was perhaps the only kind of instruction that existed. But by the beginning of the fifth century, at least at Athens, there was an organized system of musical education. |
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The qualification 'at least at Athens' is to be emphasized. We must always remember that in early Greece different communities had very different cultural traditions and institutions. They all liked the lyre and the pipes, but in the Archaic age there may have been plenty of people able to play these instruments without there having to be any systematic arrangements for teaching them to the young. What did call for some organization was the training of choruses to sing and dance at the many festivals and other occasions when choral performances were expected. In some of the Dorian states, in particular, choral training was institutionalized. In Crete boys were drafted into 'herds' and subjected to a disciplined regimen directed towards making them hardy men and tough fighters. As part of this they learned dances in armour and the singing of paeans.114 At Sparta there were similar arrangements. In the fragments of Alcman we can see that the girls who sang his songs were under the guidance of a chorus-manager (choragos) and taught to revere her and obey her like a helmsman. Perhaps she was responsible for teaching them more than song and dance. Sappho, who presided over a 'house of the Muses' servants', was certainly understood by later generations to have been a music-teacher and chorus-leader to whom people sent their daughters for some sort of education. She must have been practised at writing, to judge by the preservation (in antiquity) of ten volumes of her poetry, and it is possible that she taught this art to her |
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113 Arist. Pol. 1339a33-b10. |
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114 Ephorus, FGrH 70 F 149. 16, cf. Pl. Leg. 660b. |
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