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The simple recurring strophe of two to four lines and well-defined shape is another Indo-European feature, not characteristic of Near Eastern texts, and it has remained typical of European song.7 The singing style that we have identified as normal in ancient Greece loud, clear, without vocal constriction or artificial mannerism, with a solo singer or a chorus in well-blended unisonagain corresponds to something widely found in Europe, to what Lomax has termed the Old European style. It stands in contrast to a tense, strident, ornamented style characteristic of the 'Old High Culture' areas of Asia.8 That something like this opposition may have existed in Antiquity is suggested by the reference to the 'thin voice' in which the common-east-Mediterranean Linos song was sung.9 |
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The adoption of an oriental manner of delivery in a specific ritual context where it was traditional is analogous to the use in certain cults, in particular the worship of the Great Mother, of oriental instruments that were not used in Greek music generally. Beside these two phenomena we can set a third: the use of antiphonal or responsorial song in certain cults and ritual settings that are, or may well be, either oriental or pre-Hellenic ('Aegean') in origin. A solo singer leads off, and a chorus answers, either with ritual cries or with more articulate lines of song. The Linos is one example; others may be found in the early dithyramb and paean, in dirges and wedding songs, and in the cult of Adonis.10 It is an arrangement employed from ancient times in Jewish liturgy (and hence by the Christian Church), and almost certainly throughout the Near East.11 |
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The typology of scales and melodies is also relevant to the question of Greek music's wider affinities. The standard scale-types of Archaic Greece seem to have been based on a trichord, or two trichords, of pentatonic structure, each containing a major third and a semitone. It is very likely that diatonic music was also known, perhaps more in northern and western parts of Greece than else- |
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7 Cf. Glotta 51 (1973), 184; A. Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture, 333f.; Nettl, FTM 39-42. |
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8 A. Lomax, American Anthropologist 61 (1959), 927-54 and as above; Nettl, FTM 47-9. |
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9 See p. 45. The Egyptian and Assyrian representations of singers pressing or beating their larynxes to elicit a tremolo or glottal shake (p. 46 n. 43) are further evidence of the persistence of an oriental singing technique from Antiquity to modern times. |
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10 Cf. pp. 339f. |
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11 In modern times it is characteristic of black Africa from Nubia southwards, and consequently of some of the music of black cultures in the Americas. Cf. C. Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, 92-5; Nettl, FTM 115, 140f., 226, 228. |
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