CHAPTER VII.
In the Land of Greece.
THE SILKWORM FLUTES, OR BOMBYX FLUTES.
The next development of Greek ingenuity in the construction of flutes came in a remarkable guise, showing a contrast as great as our ships in mail and armour present to ships that carried our flag a century ago. Suddenly as it seems, with no transition stages, the Greek inventor brought forth his new flute of ivory encased in bronze. Evidently, it was an age of luxury. The Greeks valued in every respect each art that was known to them; they lavished wealth upon artists, and paid honours to orators and singers and players, no less than to sculptors and painters. No price was too great to pay for their beloved flutes. The flute of Ismenias, a celebrated Theban musician, cost at Corinth three talents—a sum equivalent to £581 5s. of our money. No intimation has ever been left to us of the basis upon which such valuation was made, whether an adventitious worth was given by encrustations of jewels and setting of gold, or whether some famous maker acquired a repute so that, like Stradivarius, every instrument from his hand was sought for by those able to appreciate artistic excellence; we cannot even guess, for in acoustic conditions there is no parity of relation between fiddles and flutes; and for all that we know, the great price quoted may have been reached in fighting for a rarity, the instinct for which is perennial in the human race. So delightful a thing is it to possess that which others covet; so exalting the exultation in having that which others have not; verily, it is the taproot of all civilisation. Without it civilisation had never been.
The particular flutes now under examination must have been costly, but only moderately so. The Greeks were adepts in metal work of all kind, and in these flutes their skill in the art is manifest; battered as they are and grey green with age, they bear the record of the master hand. The interior tube is of ivory, and the outer or encasing cylinder is of bronze. At the upper end there is a raised piece of metal, in the curve of which there is a figure of a reclining Mænad, still beautiful in figure, and in flowing lines of drapery. The flutes are the counterparts of each other, differing only in length, and slightly varying in the distance of the finger holes. The lengths are respectively eleven and a half inches and ten and a quarter inches; but the last named pipe has the end fractured, and, therefore, may have been as long as the first, or longer. The measurements may not be exact, but are approximately as stated; at all events, sufficiently so for the needs of our present purpose. It should be understood that the fragments are pieced together, and with even the most careful handling one would fear disaster.
The two instruments bear a relation to each other, very similar to that of the two sycamore flutes illustrated and described in the last chapter, and evidently also the player chose one or the other according to the mode in which he intended to play, or, as we should say, the key in which the music lay; here, however, in these segmented flute pipes the method is not the same, the particular mode depends upon the section arrangements being fixed, and laid out for a succession of intervals quite distinct for each pipe.
From the mouthpiece to the lower end the length is the same in each pipe, but the intervals that could be used in playing are not alike. Measure off the sections as in one pipe and it will be seen that no corresponding distances are found on the other; notice how differently the segments that are longest, representing a tone and a quarter or a tone and a half, come in each particular arrangement. The elevated plateau at the upper end is about three quarters of an inch in height, and the table-land at the top is about a quarter of an inch square, there being a little circular shaft drilled through the metal, leading into the body of the flute. This is to all appearance the mouthpiece, and, without questioning, I had formerly accepted the general notion that here we had specimens of the lip blown flute. The little aperture nearly a quarter inch in diameter would undoubtedly serve for blowing across, with the lip resting against the block. When, however, I came to examine these treasures of a lost art, with a view to understanding them, misgivings arose; for how could the scale be constructed, seeing that, in a lip blown cylindrical flute, the octave note would occur at the half of the length? At the fourth hole distant from the bottom opening, the note given would be the octave. No, this could not be. Moreover, the lay of the finger holes is so like that of the sycamore flute that one sees directly the correspondence, and is driven to the conclusion that we have here higher developed specimens of the reed blown aulos.
| The Silkworm Flutes. |
Fig. 20. |
Why have I named this the silkworm flute? Because the resemblance suggests itself. You will notice that the cylinder is segmented, as a caterpillar looks to be; and we know that the Greeks had a flute so peculiar that it was given the name of Bombyx, which is the name by which the silkworm caterpillar is known in science.