The harvest festivals founded in Greece led to others in Brittany, France, North Germany and England. So does the deed of one race affect other races.
The Liturgies
Among the taxes, or five special liturgies, that the Greeks had to pay, was the obligation for certain rich citizens to supply the Greek tragedies with the chorus. Every Greek play had its chorus and every chorus had to have its structures; a choregic monument to celebrate it; one or more flute players, costumes, crowns, decorations, teachers for the chorus and everything else to make it succeed. This cost, which would equal many thousands of dollars, was undertaken as a duty quite as easily as our men of wealth pay their income taxes. You can see a greatly enlarged copy of a choregic monument, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument at 89th Street and Riverside Drive, in New York City, and also one at the Metropolitan Museum.
In old Greece the musicians were also poets. Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Euripides, Plato, not only wrote their dramas but knew what music should be played with them. In fact no play was complete without its chorus and its music and its flute-player. You have heard of the Greek chorus. Don’t for a moment think it was like our chorus. It consisted of a group of masked actors (all actors in those days wore masks), who appeared between the acts and intoned (chanted) the meaning of the play and subsequent events. In fact the chorus took the place of a libretto,—“words and music of the opera,” for it explained to the audience what it should expect. It spoke and sang some of the most important lines of the play and danced in appropriate rhythms. So it brought together word, action and music, and was a remote ancestor of opera, oratorio and ballet.
Festivals
Besides the occupational songs and those for the drama festivals, the Greeks had the great game festivals where in some, not only competitions in sports took place but also flute playing and singing. The oldest of these festivals was the Olympic games, first held in 776 B.C. and every four years thereafter. These games played so important a part in the lives of the Greeks that their calendar was divided into Olympiads instead of years. While music was evident in the Olympic games, music and poetry were never among the competitions.
The Pythian games were chiefly musical and poetic contests and were started in Delphi, 586 B.C., where they were held every nine years in honor of the Delphian Apollo whose shrine was at Delphi. The Isthmian and Nemean games were also based on poetic and musical contests. Warriors, statesmen, philosophers, artists and writers went to these games and took part in them. Maybe some time we will realize the power of music as did the Greeks nearly one thousand years before the birth of Jesus.
The Greek Scales
While, as we said before, we know very little about the melodies of the Greeks, we do know something about their scales, upon which the church music of the Middle Ages was based, as are our own major and minor scales. In fact the most important contribution Greece made to our music was the scale. They had a very complicated system and no one is quite sure how it worked.
We have the two modes or kinds of scales, major and minor, which we use in different keys, but the Greeks had at least seven different modes used in many different ways. They used one mode for martial or military music, another for funeral ceremonies, another for their temple music, and curiously enough, our own C major scale they used for their popular music, for drinking songs, and light festivities.