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nightingale's lament and her 'liquid' melody.25 A fine singing voice is also characterized as 'sweet', 'like honey', or as 'lily-white'. Again, these expressions suggest that it was a smooth, pure tone that was most admired. |
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Singers practised before breakfast, we are told, because the voice is impaired by food; the windpipe is roughened by it, as after a fever. Intoxication is also said to lead to failure of the voice.26 Plato refers to choirs dieting and fasting when in training for competitions.27 One of Antiphon's speeches was written for a man who found himself accused of murder because a boy who was being trained at his house to sing in a chorus had died after drinking a potion to improve his voice. We know no further details of the misadventure, but singers who take potions presumably do so for the sake of a more mellifluous tone and to prevent hoarseness. In a comic fragment a citharode declares that washing his throat down with the sticky parts of a conger eel will strengthen his breath and voice.28 When Nero was learning citharody, he |
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omitted nothing that that type of artist did for the sake of conserving or developing the voice: he would lie with a lead sheet on his chest, purge himself with enemas and emetics, and abstain from eating obstructive fruits and foods. |
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Presently he resolved to perform in public, 'although his voice was slight and husky'.29 Finally, the romance-writer Longus, in the second century AD, completes his picture of a rustic wedding by saying that the attendant countryfolk sang the hymenaeum 'in a harsh, rough voice, as if they were breaking up the soil with forks, not singing a wedding-song'.30 Thus the style of the educated singer is defined by its antithesis. |
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The notes of the song were attacked cleanly, without swooping or sliding from one to the next. This, according to Aristoxenus, is what differentiates song from speech. |
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In conversation we avoid bringing the voice to a standstill at a particular pitch, unless we are forced to it by emotion, but in singing, on the contrary, we avoid continuous sliding up and down, and pursue stationary pitch as far as possible. The more we make each note single, static, and unchanging, the |
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25 Aesch. Ag. 245: Ar. Av. 213f.; cf. Kaimio, 202. |
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26 Ps.-Arist. Pr. 11. 22; 11. 46. |
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27Leg. 665e. |
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28 Clearchus Comicus fr. 2. |
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29 Suet. Ner. 20. |
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30Daphnis and Chloe 4. 40. 2. |
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