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Resistance To the New Music |
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The new trends were not to everyone's taste. There were many, both musicians and laymen, who deprecated them. We hear of one Pancrates who generally avoided the chromatic genus, declaring himself a follower of the old style of Simonides and Pindar. |
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The same applies to Tyrtaeus of Mantinea, Andreas of Corinth, Thrasyllus of Phlius, and many others, all of whom, we know, have as a matter of choice abstained from the chromatic genus, modulation, polychordy, and many other available resourcesrhythms, tunings, diction, melodic construction and interpretation. Telephanes of Megara, for instance, was so opposed to the syringes that he never let his aulos-makers even put them on his auloi, and he stayed out of the Pythian competition mainly for this reason.53 |
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Another conservative aulete was Dorion, who used to play for Philip of Macedon. He eschewed the fashionable style of Antigeneidas, and he was not without followers. It was he who made the scathing comment on Timotheus' storm effects cited earlier.54 |
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Plato, following the lead of Damon, opposed many of the tendencies of modern music as morally harmful. In the Republic, discussing the cultural education of his ideal city's guardians, he rules out the imitation by men of women doing unseemly things like scolding their husbands, boasting against the gods, lamenting, dying, in love, in labour; or of slaves, or of men displaying cowardice, abusing each other, insane; or of neighing horses, bellowing bulls, noisy rivers, crashing seas, thunder and tempest, axles and pulleys, trumpets, panpipes, and other instruments. All this can only be done by using a whole range of different scales, rhythms, and changes of one to another. Once it is excluded, there will be no need of polychordy and omnimodality in the music, or of instruments such as harps or auloi that yield excessive numbers of notes and scales, or of complex rhythms.55 In the Laws Plato is more explicit. Composers |
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53 Ps.-Plut. De mus. I 137f-1138a, from Aristoxenus. This Telephanes, originally from Samos, was a well-known figure, cf. Dem. Meid. 17, IG 22. 3093, CEG 552 with Hansen's notes, Nicarchus HE 2747-50, Paus. 1.44.6, Ath. 351 e. On the mysterious syrinx see p. 86. |
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54 Theopomp. loc. cit.; ps.-Plut. De mus. 1138ab, from Aristoxenus; Ath. 337c-338a. Two of the authors quoted by Athenaeus, Machon (53 Gow) and Aristodemus, call him a composer of instrumental music (kroumatopoios). |
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55Resp. 395 d-400 a. Plato may have in mind, among other modern compositions, Timotheus' Niobe (woman boasting against gods). Semele (in labour), Nauplios (the storm). and Ajax's Madness. |
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