|
|
|
|
|
|
|
most frequent and varied modulations give the greatest pleasure.65 The quest for novelty continued. 'Music, like Africa, keeps producing some new kind of animal every year.'66 Timotheus and the others were already being favourably compared with their juniors. A character in a comedy written sometime after Philoxenus' death praised him as the best of poets, with his original diction, his fine blending of melodic colourings and modulations; a god among men, he knew true music, 'whereas the men of today compose ivy-twined, spring-watery, flower-flittery songs in threadbare language, interwoven with alien melodies'.67 This sounds like the 'patchwork' style associated with Polyidus of Selymbria, which, according to Aristoxenus, most citharodes had taken up in place of the Timothean manner. Polyidus won a dithyrambic victory at Athens sometime between 398 and 380. A pupil of his, one Philotas, managed to defeat the aging Timotheus in a contest; but when Polyidus expressed his pride at this, the citharist Stratonicus remarked that Philotas' songs were not real nomoi like Timotheus'.68 The Peripatetic Phaenias wrote of two recent lyricists, Telenicus of Byzantium and Argas, who were fluent in their own manner 'but fell far short of the nomoi of Terpander and Phrynis': Phrynis has joined Terpander as a classic.69 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
After the time of Aristoxenus and Phaenias we find ourselves in a world seemingly devoid of acknowledged composers. The public's interest had come to be concentrated on performers, while the performers drew largely on established repertory and had their greatest successes with it. Of course new music was being composed all the time. But for the next 400 years and more, while we know the names of dozens of acclaimed poets, singers, actors, and auletes, the only composers we can name are the handful who chance to be recorded on commemorative inscriptions, such as the Athenians Athenaeus and Limenius whose paeans were sung at Delphi in 127 BC, or the few mentioned in literary sources, such as Glauce of Chios |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
65 Ps.-Hippoc. De Victu 1. 18. 1. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
66 Anaxilas fr. 27 K.-A. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
67 Antiphanes fr. 207 K.-A. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
68 Aristox. in ps.-Plut. De mus. 1138b; Marm. Par FGrH 239 A 68: Ath. 352b. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
69 Phaenias fr. 10 Wehrli. For Argas cf. Anaxandrides frs. 16. 4, 42. 17 K.-A.; Alexis fr. 19. 3 K.-A. |
|
|
|
|
|