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how Sachs interprets them,19 and D. Paquette has offered a detailed explanation.20 What remains puzzling, if this view is correct, is the way in which the design of the functional device seems to be prefigured in the purely ornamental intricacies of the older kithara. In fact there was a long tradition, going back to Minoan and Egyptian models, of volutes, zigzags, or other complications in the arms of the box lyre below the crossbar. Whether they had any structural purpose is not clear.21 |
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The great majority of representations of the kithara give us only a full frontal or (less often) a full dorsal view, and do not allow us to form any idea of the depth of the soundbox. However, reliefs from the Sicyonian Treasury at Delphi and the Parthenon, and a red-figure vase showing a kithara from the side, together with one or two other scraps of evidence, indicate that the back of the soundbox had quite a bulge or hump, especially towards the top, and that there was a ridge running down the bulge to the base.22 The soundbox, in other words, seems to have been shaped something like the stern half of a rowing boat with the hull folded up to seal the front and the top covered over with a deck, the whole thing standing on its end. |
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The square-based kithara in this classic form was the instrument of the professional citharode who competed at the Pythian, Panathenaic, and other contests, or put on public performances of his own. The vase-painters also supply it to the citharodes' patron deity, Apollo, while other gods such as Hermes and Dionysus play simpler kinds of lyre (see below). Aristotle speaks of the kithara as a 'professional' (technikon) instrument, unsuitable for general educational use.23 The citharode emphasized that he was a man apart by wearing an especially fine costume: an ankle-length, richly ornamented or |
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19HMI 130. 'an ingeniously made, and artistically carved, lever which lifted the crossbar, thus tightening all the strings at once. This invention had a forerunner, however; as early as the fifteenth century B.C., Egyptian lyres had movable arms which, piercing the body, could be pushed upward at will by the player's knee or chest.' Likewise J. W. Schottländer (unpublished dissertation cited by Neubecker 73); B. Lawergren, Imago Musicae 1 (1984). 150, 'drawn details suggest hinges. springs, and other movable parts'. For slackening lyre-strings when not in use cf. Plut. De educandis liberis, 9c. |
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20 Paquette, 91, 95f., 241-3. |
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21 According to Wegner, Musikleben, 32f. and Musik und Tanz, 7, 8, it was advantageous to prevent the vibrations from the strings reaching the soundbox from the crossbar, via the arms, and interfering with the resonances set up directly through the bridge. |
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22 See R. A. Higgins and R. P. Winnington-Ingram, JHS 85 (1965), 69f.; Maas-Snyder, 33, 65. |
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23Pol. 1341a18. |
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