If this be too subtle an instance, there is another so striking that it is worth mentioning on the chance of the reader’s verifying it some day for himself. The Hungarian gypsies who form the national bands are chiefly occupied at entertainments in playing for the national dance—the csárdás—tunes which have now become familiar, some of them, through the transcriptions of Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The dance consists in a gradually increasing excitement, starting from a slow and grave beginning. The change is produced merely by increase of time in often repeating the same air,[45] and also in adorning it with flourishes, which are added ad libitum and somewhat barbarously, by the members of the band according to their taste. The effect of this gradual hurrying and complicating of the same tune is inexpressibly affecting to the mind. It represents excitement, and often voluptuous excitement, to the highest degree. It would have thoroughly shocked Plato and his school.
This simpler example, though less easily verifiable to the English reader, is really more to the point, for there can be no doubt that it is owing to the increase of complication, and the growth of the intellectual combinations in music, that we have lost sight of what the Greeks thought so vital—the direct moral effects of music.
§ 43. The question remains, What did the Greeks convey by this theory? Were they talking nonsense, or was their music so different from ours that their theories have no application in our day? We cannot adopt either of these solutions, though all our researches into Greek scales, and into the scanty examples of tunes still extant, are unable to show clearly what they meant. We cannot make out why tunes in the Doric scale—a scale varying slightly from our ordinary minor scale—should be thought manly and moral, while Lydian measures—a scale like our ordinary major scales—should be thought immoral.[46] We must give up the problem of finding out a solution from the Greek scales. But this we may fairly assert, that our music, being directly descended from the old Church scales, which again were derived from the Greek, cannot be so totally different from that of the old Greeks as to warrant the inference that theirs could be moral or the reverse, and ours indifferent to morals. We may depend upon it that they did not talk nonsense, and that the general consent of all their thinking men on this curious point is well worthy of our most serious attention.
It is probable that the far greater complexity of our music, the multiplication of instruments, the development of harmony, has brought out intellectual instincts unknown to them, and so obscured the moral questions once so striking. The Chinese of the present day, who have a music far simpler than ours, mostly on the tetratonic scale, are said to speak of the moral influence of music as the Greeks did, and to put the composing and circulating of tunes under a certain control. They used to have state composers charged with this duty, in order to preserve and improve the morals of the people. Although, then, it seems that the simpler the character of a national music, the more clearly its moral effects are perceived, we only want a closer analysis to detect the same qualities in our own composers. Much of the best music we now hear is unduly exciting: it feeds vain longings, indefinite desires, sensuous regrets; and were the evidence stated in detail, the sceptical reader might be convinced that here we are far behind the Greek educators, and that we often deliberately expose our children to great moral risk by inciting them to express their semi-conscious desires in affecting music. The majority who have no soul for music may be safe enough (though this is not certain); but those whose soul speaks through their fingers, or their voice, are running a very serious danger, of which there is not the least suspicion among modern educators. To seek corroboration from the characters of leading musicians were invidious, but not without instruction.[47]
This inquiry is no digression which requires apology. It is a point in which we do not seem to have reflected as deeply as the ancients, and which is well worth discussing without pedantry or sentimentality. It is also true that the general aspect of this side of Greek education is more interesting and fruitful than the inquiry into the structures of the particular instruments they used—an antiquarian question very minutely discussed by learned historians of music, and by compilers of archæological lore. On these details we may here be brief. The subject has been exhausted by Mr. Chappell, our best historian of music.
§ 44. In education we never hear of the use of those more complicated instruments, such as the τρίγωνον, or harp, the double flute and others, which were used by professionals. On the other hand, the favorite syrinx, or pandean-pipe, was only in fashion among shepherds, and not in schools. We may assume that nothing was there admitted but the simplest form of stringed instrument, the lyre (λύρα), which was originally made by stretching strings across the inside of the back shell of a tortoise. These shells are often to be found dry and clean in river-courses through Greece. The tortoise when dead is eaten out by ants or other insects; the shells separate, and are carried away and cleaned by floods. This most primitive kind was, however, supplanted by a more elaborate form, which used the two shells of the tortoise, and fastened, in the position of its front legs, a pair of goat’s horns, which were spanned near their extremity by the ζύγον, or yoke, to which strings were drawn from the far end of the shell, over the nether surface, or breast shell, which was flat. This, with seven or at most ten strings, was the ordinary instrument used to teach Greek boys to play. The more elaborate cithara, which still survives, both in name and structure, among the Tyrolese, was a lyre with a sound-box built of thin wood or metal plates, and elongated into hollow arms (where the lyre only had horns, or solid wooden arms), so that the resonance was considerably greater. This, in the form called πηκτίς, had fifteen or more strings, and does not here concern us. The use of the bow for stringed instruments was unknown to the Greeks, but they used for playing the plectrum, which is still used by the Tyrolese for their zither.
The favorite wind-instrument was not our flute, which was called πλαγίαυλος, or “cross-played aulos,” and which was not popular, but our clarinet, the αὐλός, which was held straight, was wide at the mouth, and produced its tone by means of a vibrating tongue in the mouthpiece. The ordinary aulos was played without any artificial aid; but for the double aulos, where two reeds of different pitch were blown from the same mouthpiece, a leather bandage was tied over the player’s mouth, into which the mouthpiece was fitted. This was the most extreme form of that disfigurement of which the Greeks complained in flute-playing.
The tunes taught to boys are now lost, and we cannot hope to reproduce them. But there is good reason to think that they would not suit the developed taste of our day, and would be considered dull and even ugly. This we may infer from the few extant fragments of Greek tunes.
FOOTNOTES
[41] ἔστι δὲ τέτταρα σχεδόν, ἃ παιδεύειν εἰώθασι, γράμματα καὶ γυμναστικὴν καὶ μουσικήν, καὶ τέταρτον ἔνιοι γραφικήν.—Pol., viii. p. 259.