As for the value of the Pythagorean school as a whole, it is manifest that it must be considered as a group of mystical speculators, professing to be students of music and claiming Pythagoras as their master, but, in actual verity, doing little more than reducing sounds to air vibrations and ascertaining the numerical relations of pitch. Lovers of music they were not, they were mathematical precisians, perceiving no beauty and hearing no inspiration in melodic sounds except in such wise as these fitted into an ordered sequence of arithmetical form.
The development of the Pythagorean school was rendered all the more self-centred by the vitality and strength of the Empiricists. This flourishing school of musical art was concerned with arbitrary regulations as to the most acceptable forms of composition. The Empiricists determined what melodies were suitable to certain instruments. They debarred the flute from certain festivals and admitted it to others, they decided upon the forms of construction of musical instruments, and, above all, they insisted upon the performance of certain compositions in the traditional style. While not avowedly hostile to the Pythagoreans, the Empirical school paid little heed to the mathematical speculations of the learned, and song and dance continued because music was an art. Great as was the symbolic majesty of the Monochord, the surging strain of the lyre meant infinitely more to the life of Ancient Greece.
The second great development of Greek musical philosophy is that of Aristoxenus (b. 354 B. C.), whose systemization of the transposition scales has already been mentioned. If Pythagoras established some of the fundamental rules of acoustics, Aristoxenus may be given the credit of establishing Musical Science; the former was a branch of a science, the second was the science of an art.
To put the essential principles of Aristoxenus in the simplest possible form it may be said that he established two principal rules: (1) that music accepts Sound as sounds heard by the ear, and that the science of music must be built upon the foundation of sounds that are heard; (2) that sound-functions exist, possessing properties of sonance not directly reducible to any simple or elemental numerical ratio. The work of Aristoxenus was a revolution in musical philosophy based upon the principle of music as an organic whole of sounds bearing a dynamic relation each to the other. Aristotle had not been able to break away from the old Pythagorean conception, but Aristoxenus brushed away the misty speculations of morality, the mathematical entanglements and the musty formalism that surround the music of his time and set himself to answer the one vital question: Why does Music employ certain sounds and reject certain others?
The third stage of development of Greek music may be represented by Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in the second century of the Christian era. He may, with considerable authority, be deemed the inventor of the first interpreter of the equal tempered scale. R. C. Phillips has thrown considerable light upon the disputed questions involved in this matter, and to his monograph on the ‘Harmonic Tetrachords of Claudius Ptolemy’ (1904) we may refer the reader desirous of detailed information. Leaving the question of theory, we now proceed to pick up the thread of mythical story and trace what we can of the history of Greek composition.
V
All legendary references to the prehistoric era of Greek music point to its importation into Hellas by various artists, partly from the North (Thessaly and Thrace) and partly from the East (Asia Minor). In this we see probably nothing more than a racial recollection of the Dorian migration, which, as we know, took place about the year 1104 B. C. Orpheus, of whom we have already spoken, must be counted among the Northerners, the Thracians, for his native place was Pieria at the foot of Mt. Olympus. His pupil, Musaios, was supposed to have lived in Athens, and his son Eumolpos was the progenitor of the famous family of priests and singers which were entrusted perpetually with the rites of the Eleusinian mysteries, sacred to Demeter. Amphion, another of the Northern artists (the miraculous builder of the walls of Thebes), is described by Pausanias (Græco-Roman historian, 2d Cent., A. D.) as a relative of Tantalos of Lydia, and to have brought from there the Lydian mode. He is also credited with having increased the lyre from four to seven strings. Heraclides Ponticus calls him the founder of the kitharœdic school of poetry, which was governed by a method and laws distinct from the auletic school, associated with the aulos, the Grecian flute, from which it took its name. The regulation of the cult of Apollo at Delphi is ascribed to Philammon, whose son Thamyris, a native of the more uncultured regions of Thrace, was said to have challenged the muses to contest, and to have been punished for this offense with blindness.
Thus the North was, as we have seen, the home of the kitharœdic muse; Phrygia, on the other hand, must be considered as the cradle of the auletic school, of which the most prominent early names are Hyagnis, Marsyas, and Olympus, the three oldest players upon the flute. The first of these was said to be the inventor of that art. Marsyas was his son and first disciple, while Olympus introduced the art into Greece and became the first Hellenic master of artistic instrumental music.[38]
The first distinct period of musical composition is that of the nomoi (sing. nomos; Gr. [Greek: nomos] = law), a certain type of melodies constructed according to fixed rules, which were sung as solos to verses whose subject was usually the praise of some god. (The singers performing them were known as aœds and later as rhapsodists.) The earliest nomoi were melodies of very simple structure, but from the first there is a distinction between the kitharœdic and auletic types, the first of which is supposed to have followed the Homeric hexameter (iambic metre), and the latter to have been based on the elegiac measures, offering, however, a considerable variety of rhythm.