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This book will trace the lifecycle of the Greek seven-stringed lyre, its
music, and cultural contextualization, including performance practices
and the mythological elaboration of associated ideas. It will be the first
book-length study of this subject, and uses a new approach: placing Greek
musical history in a larger Mediterranean-Near Eastern context.
The instrument is first encountered in the Mycenaean palaces of the Late
Bronze Age, when it was probably taken over from the Minoans, whose instruments
are of similar design. This borrowing represents a hitherto unexplored,
and indeed unsuspected, musical aspect of the Late Bronze Age metaculture
which has attracted increasing attention through works like Walter Burkert’s
Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur
(Heidelberg, 1984), Sarah Morris’ Daidalos and the Origins of Greek
Art (Princeton, 1992) and Martin West’s The East Face of Helicon
(Oxford, 1997). In Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, Anatolia, and Greece alike
at this time, poetry was integral to a wide range of religious and social
rituals, which is why the surviving evidence has an interest which goes
far beyond that of literary history in the modern sense. It is in fact
one of the principal sources, and in many cases the best, for understanding
the spiritual and intellectual identity of these cultures. Because these
poetic traditions were fundamentally musical, the musical evidence at
our disposal, which has remained largely unconsidered by the scholarly
mainstream, can make an important contribution to this emerging picture.
To explain the title: The most clearly identifiable feature of the Mesopotamian
musical system is its organization around a central string.- Scattered
Greek sources relating to the music of the Archaic period also attest
in the music of the seven-stringed lyre a central role for the middle
string mesê, from which the rest of the strings took their form
and tonal ‘meaning’ (dynamis). Moving from the practical to
the symbolic, the Babylonian scribes labelled their central string Ea-Made-It,
after the craftsman-god and patron of music. Traces of this conception
are also found in thirteenth century texts from Ugarit in the person of
the divine lyre (knr), as known from the pantheon text, and beloved of
Kothar, the Canaanite equivalent of Ea. The divine knr survived into Iron
Age Cyprus in the myth of Kinyras, the lyre-playing, prophetic priest-king
of Aphrodite Ourania. In Greece itself the seven-stringed lyre is presented
as a New Muse in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes — where it is again connected
with an inventor god — while at Delphi its central string (mesê)
was deified as a Muse. In the Pythagorean tradition the central string
was equated with the Sun or Central Fire in the doctrine of the Harmony
of the Spheres, in which the seven-stringed lyre served as a microcosm
of the universe.
Thus ‘Middle Muse’ is both hopefully ear-catching and evocative
and gets at both the practical and contextual aspects of the problem at
hand, at the same time introducing to classicists a true cultural ‘entity’
previously unknown to the scholarly pantheon.
Introduction
This chapter, previously submitted, presents the basic problem: the recent
discovery of cuneiform musical texts which overturn the basic premises
of the current view of Greek musical history. They document the existence
by 1800 B.C. and earlier of a complete system of heptatonic or seven-note
scales much like our own. According to the communis opinio established
by R. P. Winnington-Ingram in Mode in Ancient Greek Music (Cambridge,
1936), such a conception was first developed only in the fourth century,
and by the Greeks. I explore and counter the assumptions behind this view,
and outline my approach of placing Greece within a larger musical history
of the Near East (including Anatolia and Egypt), sketching the historical
and cultural vectors which will be treated in Part One, and explaining
how this will underpin the technical analysis of Part Two.
Part One: The Seven-Stringed Lyre
The first half of the book is best organized as a social history of
the seven-stringed lyre, the instrument on which in Greece the Mesopotamian
system was practiced, in living, evolving form, from the Mycenaean palaces
down through the Archaic period, to be overthrown on the demotic stages
of Classical Athens. Traces of the original conception also survived in
the symbolic Nachleben which the instrument enjoyed until the end of antiquity,
especially in the Pythagorean tradition. The structure of the four chapters
of Part One will follow basic periods of Greek history — Mycenaean,
Dark Age, Orientalizing/Early Archaic, and the transition from Late Archaic
to Classical.
Chapter
1. Palatial Music in the Bronze Age
This chapter traces, in cultural and historical terms rather than narrowly
technical, the development of a common heptatonic musical system, practiced
in palace and temple, from its inception in third-millennium Sumer, to
its adoption throughout Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period (c.1800),
and on to its diffusion in the Near East as part of a classical scribal
culture on the Mesopotamian model. Special attention is paid to Ugarit
and Hattusha, where Hurrian, Canaanite and Hittite records attest the
adoption of the musical system by the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500). I then
assemble and reassess the Mycenaean evidence, including the new Theban
tablet which attests lyre-players as part of the palace personnel, in
light of this musical metaculture. The Minoans are assumed to have been
important intermediaries, but in the absence of written sources the most
important transitional material survives on Cyprus in the figure of Kinyras,
who links the Hellenic world to the East via Ugarit (see above). I present
Kinyras as one of several ‘Harp Gods’ who derive from the common
Mesopotamian practice, best described in the Gudea Cylinders of the Neo-Sumerian
period (c. 2150), of divinizing temple instruments, which are thereby
granted the powers of wonder-working and inclusion in mythologies. Against
this background I then propose and explicate several Greek reflexes, including
the myths of Amphion and Orpheus, who used lyre-music to establish order
from chaos, whether in the construction myth of Thebes — modelled
on Babylonian foundation ritual (as Burkert has argued) — or in the
taming of nature and overcoming of death. These myths are thus important
vestiges of palatial wisdom traditions which depended intimately on the
seven-stringed lyre.
Chapter
2. The Lyre Adrift
The title of this chapter alludes to the myth that the head and lyre of
Orpheus, after his death, were cast in the sea and washed ashore at Lesbos.
This symbolizes, I argue, the survival of Mycenaean lyre traditions, and
hence the Mesopotamian system, during the period of Achaean migration
following the collapse of the palaces at the end of the Bronze Age. Here
I study the archaeological material and myth-historical traditions which
bear on this question. The Amphion and Orpheus material considered in
Chapter 1 already supports the hypothesis, since these myths are only
attested in Iron Age sources. The material record is inconclusive in isolation,
since artistic conventions of this period were not concerned with precise
representation, and so lyres with precisely seven strings disappear for
four centuries. Other morphological features, however, when taken in conjunction
with the myths, tend to confirm the hypothesis. The last seven-stringed
lyre representation of the Bronze Age is found on post-palatial Crete
in a Mycenaean context, suggesting that, unlike literacy, the instrument
did not disappear with the fall of the palaces. On Cyprus, Aegean lyres
first (i.e. round-bottomed) appear in eleventh century iconography, just
when the Achaeans are supposed to have arrived, and subsequently undergo
local (partially Anatolianizing) mutation. Most important for Greece itself,
however, is the strong tradition of citharody on Lesbos, the main seat
of Aeolian colonization. The earliest known Lesbian citharode is Terpander,
an historical figure attested in Archaic inscriptions, who in later sources
is often called the inventor of the seven-stringed lyre. This tradition
is one of Greek music’s most disputed topics, beginning from Ludwig
Deubner’s controversial article ‘Die viersaitige Leier’
(Athenische Mitteilungen 54 [1929], 194-200). I propose the new interpretation
that Terpander’s status of inventor may be explained by the new pan-Hellenism
that emerged by the seventh century, and his association with the Doric
and Northwest Greek performance centers of Sparta and Delphi. The seven-stringed
lyre was indeed new for these post-Achaean Greeks (accepting a traditional
model of migration/invasion), and Terpander justly became for them its
inventor, and persisted into the Classical period as a cultural hero,
especially in Sparta. This picture is then used to explain the Arcadian
myth of Hermes’ invention of the instrument, and his gift of it to
Apollo, since Arcadia was a stronghold of Achaean traditions, while Apollo
had an important Doric dimension, and presided over Delphi, a new pan-Hellenic
center.
Chapter
3. ‘A Feast of Music’: The Orientalizing Period in Greek Music
In the increasingly prosperous eighth and seventh centuries, the Greeks
were reinvolved in the Near Eastern metaculture — which had itself
undergone four centuries of development — first through extensive
contact with the Phoenicians, especially in the eighth century, and then
through indirect inspiration from Assyria which, in the seventh century,
conquered the Phoenician cities and inspired peripheral states like Lydia
to emulate the life of the imperial court. This chapter assembles musical
traditions from this period, and analyses them in terms of these vectors.
First I consider evidence from Cyprus and Cilicia. On Cyprus a vigorous
Phoenician colony was founded at Kition in the ninth century to exploit
local mineral resources, and this spurred a vibrant Semitic, Hellenic,
and native Cypriot (‘Alashiyan’) cultural plurality. This is
reflected musically in a remarkable series of symposium bowls (paterai),
originating in the Levant but soon imitated locally, which collectively
contain a stereotyped repertoir of motifs, one of which is a typical musical
ensemble known throughout the Near East, comprising lyres, pipes and percussion.
In examples made on Cyprus, and one found in Greece, the stereotyped motifs
persist, but with Phoenician lyres replaced by Hellenic. This must be
understood in light of the orientalizing banquet which starts to appear
in the Aegean at this time, and which was the principal stage for the
personal poetry, accompanied by the seven-stringed lyre, which was cultivated
at this time by the Archaic élite. These new customs became mainstream
in the seventh century, at the time of the Neo-Assyrian acme; for the
Assyrian emperors had themselves adopted elements of the practice from
the Levant after their conquest. This is why, in Greek sources, the best
evidence is related less to the Phoenicians than to the Lydians who, from
the accession of Gyges and the Mermnad dynasty c.700, actively emulated
the court life of the Assyrians, with whom they had established diplomatic
ties, and whose emperor had proclaimed a ‘Feast of Music’ for
the ‘princes of the four regions who had submitted to the yoke of
my rule’. The royal court at Sardis, along with Sparta, provided
the most prestigious performance opportunities of the day, and the Lesbian
citharodes, including Terpander, were at the center of the movement. Assyrian
musical practices may be inferred behind Greek traditions of Lydian harp
music in court and military contexts, since the harp was otherwise very
rare in Anatolian tradition (as shown by Hittite imperial evidence). Similarly,
Terpander was credited with the invention of the barbitos, the alto lyre
used in symposia, and the genre of drinking songs (skolia), both of which
are connected with the Greco-Lydian milieu. Terpander’s pan-Hellenic
celebrity status guaranteed that this reinfusion of Mesopotamian and Levantine
influence to the inherited Bronze Age tradition became common currency
in Greece, passing into the mainstream of the ‘classical’, i.e.
Archaic, citharody.
Chapter
4. The Aulos Revolution and the ‘Demise of Music’
The title comes from an Aristophanic scholion, which states that the ‘Song-benders
of Circular Choruses’ caused the ‘Demise of Music’ (diaphthora
mousikês). This alludes to the dithyramb of fifth-century Athens
and the controversial modulations or ‘bends’ (kampai) of the
double-pipes (aulos) which, according to conservative critics like Plato,
ruined the ‘good music’ (to kalon) — i.e. the conventions
of the Archaic élite and their seven-stringed lyre. This chapter
follows the rise of the modulatory music, which in fact was not at first
particular to the dithyramb I resolve a crux which was not addressed by
Peter Wilson (‘The Aulos in Athens", in Goldhill, S. D./Osborne,
R. [eds.], Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 1999),
58-95) and noted but not explained by Robert Wallace (‘An Early Fifth-Century
Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music’, Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology 101 [2003], 73-92) — namely, that in the first half of
the fifth century the aulos was held in high regard by the Athenian élite.
In fact, auletic polyphônia may be traced well back into the Archaic
period, beyond even Sakadas and the sixth century Argive efflorescence
alluded to by Herodotus (3.131 f.). The important distinction to draw,
then, is not between lyre and aulos per se, but between heptatonic norms
— formulated in terms of chordophones, but supplying harmonic material
for all instruments (as seen in Greek, Ugaritic and Mesopotamian sources
alike) — and a post-heptatonic musical movement, driven by auletes
but gradually infecting music as a whole, which began to break free of
Archaic convention in the late sixth century. By an accident of musical
history, Lasus of Hermione introduced to the Athenian dêmos the
trendy polyphonic aulos music for which the Peisistratids must have first
summoned him from the Argolid in the late sixth century — a taste
which must have been shared by the contemporary élite. But because,
under the direction of Lasus, the dithyramb was instituted in Athens on
a massive scale in order to consolidate the new political structure of
the Cleisthenic reform, the aulos and its polyphônia came to be
regarded as base and demotic. This stimulated an aristocratic reaction
in figures like Damon, Critias and Plato, and caused the seven-stringed
lyre to be exalted as a symbol of order against the ataxia of musical
modernism. Thus in Classical Athens, and gradually elsewhere in the Greek
world as Athenian cultural influence spread, we may observe the progressive
fossilization of the seven-stringed lyre tradition — what ethnomusicologists
would call the ‘museum effect’ — and its replacement by
modern forms which became firmly established concert repertoire in the
Hellenistic period. This marks the effective end of the Mesopotamian tradition’s
lifecycle, although, as mentioned above, vestiges persisted in the instrument’s
symbolic afterlife.
Part
Two: The Symphonic Circle
The ‘Symphonic Circle’ is my own coinage, suggestive and I hope
colourful, for the heptatonic system of the Mesopotamian tablets, which
relies on tuning by consonance (Greek symphônia), and which is arranged
in a cycle. This second half of the book traces, on the basis of technical
sources (Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Ugaritic and Greek), the descent
of this system in Greece, against the historical framework established
in Part One. The abstracts of the following chapters will be somewhat
briefer: because the arguments will be quite technical, it would be fruitless
to present them here in detail.
Chapter Five. The Mesopotamian Tuning Cycle
In this chapter I tell the story of the discovery of the cuneiform musical
tablets and the progressive reconstruction of the heptatonic cycle between
1960 and 1969 by Anne Kilmer (Berkeley), the late Oliver Gurney, and others.
The relevant publications are scattered in assyriological and musicological
publications, and so have escaped the notice of classicists. Moreover,
though the story has been briefly recapitulated elsewhere, there is still
lacking a full exposition which is simple and clear enough for the average
non-musical assyriologist or classicist to understand the musical facts,
and for the average musiciologist to understand the philological issues.
Under the guidance of Anne Kilmer I present critical texts of the three
key tablets (which will appear in an appendix), and offer new observations
on long-standing problems.
Chapter Six. Diatonos Mousikê: Dismantling the Aristoxenian
System
The fundamental problem with Greek technical sources is that our earliest
witness is Aristotle’s pupil Aristoxenus, who represents Greek music
at a very advanced stage of development. When he devised his diagramma
polytropon (incorporating and expanding upon the systêma teleion
of his predecessors) and drafted the mostly-extant Elementa Harmonica,
the era of the seven-stringed lyre and its conventions were already nearly
two centuries outmoded. The earlier state of affairs is only hinted at
in non- or sub-technical sources (fifth century poets, Plato, Aristotle,
and several later writers). This chapter shows how the Aristoxenian system
may be understood as founded upon a diatonic substructure of the sort
known in the Near East, and that it was intimately connected with the
seven-stringed lyre, the heptatonos phorminx of Terpander fr. 2 (Gostoli).
Chapter Seven. Quaestio Errorum Plena: The Archaic Heptachord
This chapter title comes from the exasperated pronouncement of K. von
Jan (Musici scriptores Graeci [Leipzig, 1895], a godfather of Greek music
studies, on a collection of testimonies which concern the original nomenclature
and intervallic structure of the Archaic seven-stringed lyre. In theorists
from Aristoxenus onwards, musical structures are always presented in octachordal
form, using eight distinct string names. And yet it is certain from Archaic
iconography and later literary sources that the early lyre always had
seven strings. In this chapter I propose new readings of the relevant
texts which resolve this issue. I identify the original seven strings,
arguing that one of them was known by two names (whether these were regional
or chronological variants will remain unclear) which were deployed separately
in later theory.
Chapter 8. The Epicentric Strings
Once the seven Archaic strings have been established, mesê emerges
as a true center in the Archaic heptachordal nomenclature. This chapter
assembles evidence which proves that this was indeed a purposeful and
clearly apprehended conception. Beginning with Aristotle, a number of
sources either refer directly to what I call the ‘epicentric’
arrangement, or elaborate a symbolism which is arguably based on such
a conception. I discuss Philolaus, the earliest witness of the lyre string
names, and his musico-cosmic system based on the central fire of the sun.
At Delphi, as mentioned above, mesê was enshrined as a Muse, and
Delphi’s vision of itself as the Navel of the World may itself have
been inspired by Babylonian epicentric cosmology. Further material is
drawn from Plato, the Aristotelian Problemata, Plutarch, Nicomachus, and
Boethius.
Chapter 9. The Middle Muse in Greece
In this chapter I assemble the scanty but precious Greek evidence which
bears not merely on the epicentric arrangement of the Archaic heptachord,
but on the musical function of the central string, and the poetic and
philosophical conceptions this inspired. Although most of the strictly
technical evidence was discussed by Winnington-Ingram, he abandoned this
line of enquiry on the grounds that the material was insufficient to allow
any denfinite conclusions about ‘mode’. But the sources take
on a completely different aspect in the light of the preceding chapters.
A musical function to the central string is not explicit in the cuneiform
sources, but the Greek material lets us reassess an old problem in the
reconstruction of the so-called Retuning Text (UET 7/70). Here only three
phases of the heptatonic cycle survive, and Gurney and others have disputed
the extent of reconstruction — through seven phases, so that all
permutations are enumerated, or through eight, so that the first is repeated
and a different sort of closure is achieved. I support the arguments of
Richard Crocker (‘Mesopotamian Tonal Systems’, Iraq 59, 175—88)
for a restoration through seven, since this allows the central string
alone to remain unchanged. A striking correlation now becomes possible
with an Aristotelian Problema which states that, of all the strings, only
mesê cannot be changed without ruining the tuning as a whole. That
the central string had such a functional role in Mesopotamia is then supported
by a statistical analysis of the one complete notated Hurrian hymn from
Ugarit (c.1400). Here the central string does indeed feature prominently.
Thus the Greek evidence can be used like a palimpsest to recover lost
aspects of a very ancient tradition going back to Sumer. This is the ultimate
payoff of the whole study, as Walter Burkert and Nick Lowe observed in
my viva (Examiners' Report here).
Appendix: Cuneiform Texts, Critical
Editions
Index Locorum
General
Index
This book will draw together and expand upon arguments from the following:
‘Musical Syncretism in the Greek Orientalizing
Period’, in Hickmann, E./Eichmann, R./Kilmer, A. (eds.), Archäologie
früher Klangerzeugung und Tonordnungen. Studien zur Musikarchäologie
2 (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Orient-Abteilung, Berlin,
2002), 441-451.
‘Diatonic Music in Greece: A Reassessment
of its Antiquity’, Mnemosyne 56.1 (2002), 669-702.
‘The Language of Musical Technique
in Greek Epic Diction’, Gaia. Revue interdisciplinaire sur la
Grèce archaïque n°7 (2003), 295-307.
‘Hearing Greek Microtones’,
forthcoming in Hagel, S. (ed.), Performing Ancient Greek Music Today (Vienna,
2005).
‘The Wisdom of the Lyre: Soundings in Ancient
Greece, Cyprus and the Near East’, in Hickmann, E./Eichmann,
R. (eds.), Musikarchäologie im Kontext: Archäologische Befunde,
historischer Zusammenhang, soziokulturelle Beziehungen und andere Bindungen.
Studien zur Musikarchäologie 5 (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut,
Orient-Abteilung, Berlin, 2006).
‘Dithyramb and the "Demise of Music"’,
forthcoming (subject to editorial approval of final revisions) in the
proceedings, edited by Kowalzig, B./Wilson, P., of the conference Song
Culture and Social Change: The Contexts of Dithyramb, held in Oxford,
July 11-13, 2004.
"‘A Feast of Music’: Assyria,
Lydia and the ‘Asiatic Kithara’", forthcoming (subject
to editorial approval of final revisions) in the proceedings, edited by
Collins, B. J./Bachvarova, M. R./Rutherford, I. (eds.), of the conference
Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbors in Ancient Anatolia, held at Emory
University, Atlanta, September 17-19, 2004.
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