The conception which we have thus been led to form of ancient Greek as it was spoken is not without bearing on the main subject of these pages. For if the language even in its colloquial form had qualities of rhythm and intonation which gave it this peculiar half musical character, so that singing and speaking were more closely akin than they ever are in our experience, we may expect to find that music was influenced in some measure by this state of things. What is there, then, in the special characteristics of Greek music which can be connected with the exceptional relation in which it stood to language?
Greek music was primarily and chiefly vocal. Instrumental music was looked upon as essentially subordinate,—an accompaniment or at best an imitation of singing. For in the view of the Greeks the words (lexis) were an integral part of the whole composition. They contained the ideas, while the music with its variations of time (rhythmos) and pitch (harmonia) furnished a natural vehicle for the appropriate feelings. Purely instrumental music could not do this, because it could not convey the ideas or impressions fitted to be the object of feeling. Hence we find Plato complaining on this ground of the separation of poetry and music which was beginning to be allowed in his time. The poets, he says, rend asunder the elements of music; they separate rhythm and dance movements from melody, putting unmusical language into metre, and again make melody and rhythm without words, employing the lyre and the flute without the voice: so that it is most difficult, when rhythm and melody is produced without language, to know what it means, or what subject worthy of the name it represents (kai hotô eoike tôn axiologôn mimêmatôn). It is utterly false taste, in Plato's opinion, to use the flute or the lyre otherwise than as an accompaniment to dance and song [59]. Similarly in the Aristotelian Problems (xix. 10) it is asked why, although the human voice is the most pleasing, singing without words, as in humming or whistling, is not more agreeable than the flute or the lyre. Shall we say, the writer answers, 'that the human voice too is comparatively without charm if it does not represent something? (ê oud' ekei, ean mê mimêtai, homoiôs hêdy?) That is to say, music is expressive of feeling, which may range from acute passion to calm and lofty sentiment, but feeling must have an object, and this can only be adequately given by language. Thus language is, in the first instance at least, the matter to which musical treatment gives artistic form. In modern times the tendency is to regard instrumental music as the highest form of the art, because in instrumental music the artist creates his work, not by taking ideas and feelings as he finds them already expressed in language, but directly, by forming an independent vehicle of feeling,—a new language, as it were, of passion and sentiment,—out of the absolute relations of movement and sound.
The intimate connexion in Greek music between words and melody may be shown in various particulars. The modern practice of basing a musical composition—a long and elaborate chorus, for example—upon a few words, which are repeated again and again as the music is developed, would have been impossible in Greece.
It becomes natural when the words are not an integral part of the work, but only serve to announce the idea on which it is based, and which the music brings out under successive aspects. The same may be said of the use of a melody with many different sets of words. Greek writers regard even the repetition of the melody in a strophe and antistrophe as a concession to the comparative weakness of a chorus. With the Greeks, moreover, the union in one artist of the functions of poet and musician must have tended to a more exquisite adaptation of language and music than can be expected when the work of art is the product of divided labour. In Greece the principle of the interdependence of language, metre, and musical sound was carried very far. The different recognised styles had each certain metrical forms and certain musical scales or keys appropriated to them, in some cases also a certain dialect and vocabulary. These various elements were usually summed up in an ethnical type, one of those which played so large a part in their political history. Such a term as Dorian was not applied to a particular scale at random, but because that scale was distinctive of Dorian music: and Dorian music, again, was one aspect of Dorian temper and institutions, Dorian literature and thought.
Whether the Greeks were acquainted with harmony—in the modern sense of the word—is a question that has been much discussed, and may now be regarded as settled [60]. It is clear that the Greeks were acquainted with the phenomena on which harmony depends, viz. the effect produced by sounding certain notes together. It appears also that they made some use of harmony,—and of dissonant as well as consonant intervals,—in instrumental accompaniment (krousis).
On the other hand it was unknown in their vocal music, except in the form of bass and treble voices singing the same melody. In the instrumental accompaniment it was only an occasional ornament, not a necessary or regular part of the music. Plato speaks of it in the Laws as something which those who learn music as a branch of liberal education should not attempt [61]. The silence of the technical writers, both as to the use of harmony and as to the tonality of the Greek scale, points in the same direction. Evidently there was no system of harmony,—no notion of the effect of successive harmonies, or of two distinct parts or progressions of notes harmonising with each other.
The want of harmony is to be connected not only with the defective tonality which was probably characteristic of Greek music,—we have seen ([p. 42]) that there is some evidence of tonality,—but still more with the non-harmonic quality of many of the intervals of which their scales were composed. We have repeatedly dwelt upon the variety and strangeness (to our apprehension) of these intervals. Modern writers are usually disposed to underrate their importance, or even to explain them away. The Enharmonic, they point out, was produced by the interpolation of a note which may have been only a passing note or appoggiatura. The Chromatic also, it is said, was regarded as too difficult for ordinary performers, and most of its varieties went out of use at a comparatively early period. Yet the accounts which we find in writers so remote in time and so opposed in their theoretical views as Aristoxenus and Ptolemy, bear the strongest testimony to the reality and persistence of these non-diatonic scales.