|
|
|
|
|
|
|
last few pages will be devoted to a gingerly consideration of these questions.2 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In respect of instruments the Greeks' indebtedness to Aegean and west Asiatic culture is clear. They may have brought the panpipe and the cowhorn from their previous homelands,3 but their two principal instruments, the lyre and the paired oboe, came from the East, as did various others that appeared in the course of the historical period, the harp, the lute, the bagpipe. Some, like the drum, the cymbals, and the hornpipe, remained more or less confined to certain cults of Asiatic provenance. This shows that the Greeks did not accept indiscriminately whatever came into their ken. The instruments that they did accept whole-heartedly they made their own: the lyre and the auloi took on distinctively Greek forms, and were developed and improved in ways peculiar to Greece and those who learned from Greece. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The rhythms of ancient Greek music can to some extent be accounted for as Indo-European inheritance, as can the general principle of basing rhythm on the organization of syllabic quantities. We cannot identify any of their rhythms as Asiatic on the strength of foreign evidence, even if an association of the ionic rhythm with certain Asiatic cults and its use initially by East Greek poets (Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon; cf. its name 'ionic') may suggest that this rhythm was at home in Anatolia.4 The paeonic rhythm in quintuple time appears alien to Indo-European tradition, and as the ancients associated it with Crete, it may have been of Minoan origin.5 The highly distinctive dochmiac rhythm, which makes its appearance suddenly in Aeschylus and has modern Balkan parallels, may also have been taken over from some neighbour people. But in the absence of documentary evidence for rhythms used by non-Greek peoples in the Aegean area, we are groping in the dark.6 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
2 (-nj-) adv. & a. with or showing extreme caution so as to avoid making a noise or injuring oneself or what is touched or trodden on' (Concise Oxford Dictionary). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 It is to be remembered. however. that the earlier Greek panpipe has the 'Aegean' rectangular form, giving way later to the 'European' stepped form (cf. p. 111 ). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 Cf. my Greek Metre, 124. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5 Cf. above, p. 141; Greek Metre, 55. Gevaert, ii. 344 n. 2, observing that quintuple rhythm is found with the Turks, Finns, and Basques, diagnosed it as non-Indo-European. However, it has become endemic in eastern Europe regardless of racial distinctions, cf. p. 140 n. 31. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 The metre of the Lydian verse inscriptions, which I have elucidated in Kadmos 11 (1972), 165-75, does not appear to be relevant to anything in Greek music. |
|
|
|
|
|