The little brass reeds are easily made, the metal is very thin, and three strokes of a tiny chisel cut the reed. To a people so skilled in the working of metal in jewellery as the Etruscan and Greek, the making of these fine reeds would present no difficulty. Unfortunately, the slenderness has been adverse to preservation. These perishable reeds,—what tomb enshrines the one which is to satisfy our longing to know! A learned professor tells me that the Pompeiians were of the Oscan tribe, being in their remotest line called the Sabellic race, that they belonged to the large ancient group of the “Aryans.” In late times, these people mixed with the Etruscans, Pelasgians, and Safines, and their writing was similar to the Greek; and, according to language, they were related to the Sanskrit and to the Iranian languages,—namely, the Jadian and Persian. So in all our wanderings we are brought back to the old home,—to Persia, where the pathways of music begin.
CHAPTER XII.
At the Delphic Temple.
THE MUSIC HEARD BY THE GREEKS.
The latest discovered Delphian tablet can well claim to be the only authentic record yet brought to light of old Greek music, since it is the original and not a copy of a copy. Not only is it original and genuine beyond dispute, but it has also the inestimable value of being earlier in date by many centuries of any previous record of repute, and so in the style of its music more nearly representative of the simplicity of the best period of the tragic and lyric arts of the Greeks.
In his “History of Music,” Mr. W. Chappell gives examples of three Greek hymns with music, the three being in his day the only known trustworthy remains of Greek music. They were published by Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the great astronomer, at Florence in 1581, and had been copied from a Greek manuscript in the library of Cardinal St. Angelo at Rome.
A second Greek MS., which included these same hymns, was found in the library of Archbishop Usher, and from that the hymns were printed by the Oxford University in 1672. Then, in 1720, a third MS. was found in the library of the King of France at Paris, which also contained these three hymns, which supplied three or four missing notes. Although, as we have the music brought to our notice, it is barred and timed and otherwise dressed up in modern fashion, we have to remember that the Greeks knew nothing of such devices. Their notation was only by letters written above the words, which by their rhythm determined every musical feature: for the poet ruled the music. The letters had their significance as instructions according as they were placed—upright, inverted, jacent both on the back and on the face, turned right or left, and by broken parts of letters and there were accents in addition; and consequently were liable to much misconstruction or error on the part of the copyist. “The time of notes,” says Gaudentius, “is to be ruled by the rhythm of the poetry.”
So that the music was not strictly syllabic. “The length of irregular syllabic quantities has to subserve, and to be fitted into the arsis and thesis, or up and down beats, of a foot of verse in the measure that has been adopted.” This old custom is familiar to us in our Te Deum and other chants, and in oratorio recitative, and is in fact the most ancient as it has been the most universal feature in the evolution of song. Mr. Chappell quotes a Greek passage “On the Phrasing of a composition,” by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. “But rhythm and music diminish and augment the quantities of syllables, so as often to change them to their opposites. Time is not to be regulated by syllables, but syllables by time.” We know how our modern rhymesters, who write for the drawing-room or the streets, are given to ricketty irregularities of metre; but this is from slipshod guiltiness, and is quite of a different order from the poetic disposition of syllabic utterance. Read Coleridge’s “Christabel” for the most splendid example of such word music; or, in later days, Swinburne’s lines, which so often give marvellous evidence of the mastery of this rhythmic art.
With these remarks in precaution, we may look at the music to the first of those three relics, the “Hymn to Calliope” as modernly set forth:—
