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more correct the melody is perceived as being. . . . The voice has to pass imperceptibly across the interval as it ascends or descends, and render the notes bounding the interval so that they are distinct and stationary.31 |
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Song was expected to be loud and clear. Circe's whole curtilage reverberates as she sings at her loom; the earth resounds to the Muses' song as they make their way to Olympus, and when they are there, it echoes round the mountain's peak and the homes of the gods; the songs of the Trojan girls at Hector's wedding rise to the sky. Pausanias tells us that the mythical Eleuther failed to win the Pythian contest for a hymn to Apollo, although he sang 'loud and agreeably', because the hymn he performed was not his own.32 Pindar is said to have employed someone else to teach his chorus because his own voice was 'thin'.33 While symposiasts sang from their couches, people singing seriously before an audience or in lessons stood up straight, so that there was no constriction of the chest.34 Vase-painters show mouths well open. Citharodes, aulodes, and other standing singers often have their heads thrown back as they sing, as if to project the sound as far as possible. Some of them perhaps over-did it, for Timotheus in the epilogue to his Persians criticizes 'out-of-date music-spoilers, maulers of songs', who sing in stentorian voices like town criers.35 Perhaps what he is objecting to is not volume in itself but a shouting instead of a singing tone. But perhaps the New Music of the late fifth century BC, of which Timotheus was a leading representative, was finding new artistic possibilities in dynamic restraint. The dramatists of the time occasionally composed lyric dialogues that had to be sung softly so as not to wake a character who was asleep.36 |
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One feature associated with the New Music is a tendency to ornamentation. This is something which by its nature tends to be restricted to solo singing, and it was in solo, not choral singing that |
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31 Aristox. Harm. 1. 9-10. Cf. Theophr. fr. 89. 13 (Barker, GMW ii. 117), Nicom. Ench. 2 p. 238. 16ff. |
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32Od. 10. 227, Hes. Th. 42, 69, Sappho fr. 44. 26, cf. Hymn. Horn. 19. 21, Ar. Av. 216, 776-80; Kaimio, 138 n. 383, 237; Paus. 10. 7. 3. |
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33 Schol. Pind. Ol. 6. 148a, 149a. |
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34 Wegner, Musikleben 70f. |
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35PMG 791. 216-20. A later citharode performing this very work of Timotheus' in 207 BC impressed the crowd with the lamprotes of his voice (Plut. Phil. 11. 4); the word can be translated 'splendour' or 'magnificence'. There is a wholly unreliable story that Terpander choked to death when someone threw a fig into his wide-open mouth as he was singing (Tryphon, Anth. Pal. 9. 488; FGE 99-101). |
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36 Eur. HF 1042ff., Or. 136ff., Soph. Phil. 843ff. |
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