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were strophic. But in other respects their melodic style seems to have the features we should expect from followers of the New Music. |
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The Delphic paeans provide clearer evidence, being precisely dated and more extensively preserved. They use a large number of different notes (up to fifteen) and have a wide compass. The free astrophic form is employed, with much use of melodic means to enhance the expressive value of the words. There is alternation between diatonic and chromatic, with some passages in the old pentatonic manner, and some semitonal chromaticism. There is modal progression from section to section by means of conjunct-disjunct switches, much as reconstructed for Philoxenus' Mysians (p. 365). What there is not is metrical variety, though rhythmic monotony is avoided by freely alternating the various equivalent forms of paeonic foot (p. 142). Both composers speak of 'shimmering melodies', aiola melea, a phrase that suggests a link with the ideology of the New Music.116 We cannot, of course, determine how far the melodic style of these works diverged from that of Timotheus or Philoxenus. But we certainly have the impression that no major transformation had overcome music between their time and the late second century BC. |
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There is then a gap in our evidence of more than a century, perhaps a century and a half; of the Mylasa inscription (14), which falls within this period, too little remains to be useful. When further texts become available, under the early Empire, it appears that a change has taken place. The style is less ambitious, there is less harmonic elaboration. The music is fully diatonic, though exharmonic ornament is used in places, and sometimes modulation between two scale-systems. Whereas the Hellenistic and earlier pieces are regularly in the E or A mode, so that Mese functioned as the main tonal centre, the later ones are usually in the E, G, or C modes; and instead of the old tetrachordal structure there sometimes appears a clear sense of the major or minor triad (c'-e'-g' or a-c'-e') and of the importance of the interval of the third. |
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We know of one composer of this post-Hellenistic era, and one only, whose works achieved wide recognition. This was the Cretan-born citharode Mesomedes. He was a freedman of Hadrian, and apparently enjoyed an imperial salary, which (if we believe a somewhat unreliable source) the cost-cutting Pius reduced but did not |
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116 Cf. Telestes, PMG 805c. 2, 806. 3; also Soph. Ichneutai 327, Eur. Ion 499. |
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