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mix up men's words with womanish 'colouring'56 and womanish melody, or free men's melody and dance steps with slavish rhythms; they jumble into one composition the sounds of humans and animals, of musical instruments or anything else; they break up the proper union of words, melody, rhythm, and dance movement, and produce unaccompanied kithara or aulos music, in which it is very hard to understand what is supposed to be being conveyed. This is all crude and unmusical prestidigitation, this love of faultless rapidity and animal noise. The various genres used to be clearly distinct: hymns, dirges, paeans, dithyrambs, citharodic nomoi, and so on, each with its own kind of melody. |
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But as time went on, composers appeared who inaugurated unmusical rule-breaking. poetic spirits by nature but insensitive to the Muse's rights and principles, running wild and unduly possessed by pleasure, blending dirges with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs, making citharody sound like aulody, combining everything with everything, misled by their folly into denying that music has any true standard at all and saying that it is most truly judged by the pleasure it gives, be it of the better or the worse kind . . . Hence audiences became vocal instead of silent, as if they understood what is or is not fine in music, and instead of a sovereignty of the best there has come to be a loutish sovereignty of the auditorium.57 |
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Aristoxenus too felt that music had become degraded by catering for the tastes of vulgar audiences. In early times, he maintained, it existed for the purpose of honouring the gods or educating the young, and there were no auditoria, |
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but in our own times corruption has made such inroads that there is no mention or conception of the educational, and all those who engage in music have gone over to the Muse of the concert-hall.58 |
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As our auditoria have become barbarized and this vulgar music has reached an advanced state of corruption, we few in isolation recall what music used to be like.59 |
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Aristoxenus' judgement on Crexus, Timotheus, and Philoxenus has been quoted earlier (p. 359). These composers of many notes and scales, he considers, are all inferior to the old inimitable Olympus.60 They have abandoned the noble enharmonic genus, so that people |
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56 The word. chroma, is the same as that which denotes the chromatic genus; cf. p. 165. |
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57Leg. 669c-670a, 700a-701a. |
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58 Aristox. ap ps.-Plut. De mus. 1140d-f. |
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59 Aristox. fr. 124. |
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60 Ps.-Plut. De mus 1137b. |
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