A Popular History of the Art of Music / From the Earliest Times Until the Present

by W. S. B. Mathews

Our information concerning the general course of the development of music among this people is pretty accurate through a period of about 1300 years. The entire course of the Greek history of music may be divided into four great divisions, each of which was principally devoted to a certain part of the art. These divisions begin at a date which we might take approximately at about 1000 B.C., when the Homeric poems began to be chanted or sung by traveling minstrels called Rhapsodists. The schools of rhapsodies lasted for about 250 years, when choral and patriotic song began to be developed. In connection with this part of the history, there was in the later portion of it a more ornamental and fanciful development of the smaller and social uses of song, represented by Sappho, Anacreon and others. This period endured for about two centuries and a half, and by insensible degrees passed into the Attic drama, which came to its maturity at the hands of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides about 450 B.C.

Here was the culmination of Greek musical art upon the purely artistic and æsthetic side. Then followed a period of philosophizing, theory and mathematical deduction, which extended to the end of the Alexandrian schools, about 300 A.D. The limits of the present work do not permit tracing this course of progress with the amplitude which its relation to liberal education would otherwise warrant, or even to the extent which its bearing upon the present ideals of the tonal art would justify, were not the range of subjects indispensable to even a summarized treatment of musical history so wide as it has now become. But the general features of the different steps in the Greek music are the following:

As already noticed, the earliest traces of music are those in the Homeric poems, which are thought to have been composed about 1000 B.C. In these we find the minstrel everywhere a central figure, an honored guest, ready at call to entertain the company with some ballad of the ancient times, or to improvise a new one appropriate to the case in hand. The heroes themselves were not loth to take part in these exercises. Ulysses, the Odyssey tells us, occasionally took the lyre in his own hand and sang a rhapsody of his own adventures. Several centuries later, Solon, one of the famed seven wise men of Greece, composed the rhapsody of "Salamis, or the Lost Island," and sang it in a public assembly of the Athenians with so much effect that an expedition was organized, with Solon at its head, for its recovery, which presently followed triumphantly.

Many passages in the Odyssey will occur to the classical reader in illustration of the position of the minstrel in Argos in the earlier times. For example (Odyssey I, 400, Bryant's translation):

"Silent all They sat and listened to the illustrious bard Who sang of the calamitous return Of the Greek host from Troy, at the command Of Pallas. From her chamber o'er the hall The daughter of Icarius, the sage queen Penelope, had heard the heavenly strain, And knew its theme. Down by the lofty stairs She came, but not alone; there followed her Two maidens. When the glorious lady reached The threshold of the strong-built hall, where sat The suitors, holding up a delicate veil Before her face, and with a gush of tears, The queen bespake the sacred minstrel thus: 'Phemius, thou knowest many a pleasing theme— The deeds of gods and heroes, such as bards Are wont to celebrate. Take, then, thy place, And sing of one of these, and let the guests In silence drink the wine; but cease this strain; It is too sad. It cuts me to the heart, And wakes a sorrow without bounds—such grief I bear for him, my lord, of whom I think Continually; whose glory is abroad Through Hellas and through Argos, everywhere.' "And then Telemachus, the prudent, spake— Why, O my mother! canst thou not endure That thus the well graced poet should delight His hearers with a theme to which his mind Is inly moved? The bards deserve no blame; Jove is the cause, for he at will inspires The lay that each must sing.'"

Later than the Homeric rhapsodists, the Hesiodic poems were composed and sung similarly by wandering minstrels, who, although wandering, were not on that account lowly esteemed. There were regular schools, or more properly guilds, of rhapsodists, into which only those were admitted as masters who were able to treat the current topics with the light and inspiring touch of real poetry, and only those taken as apprentices who evinced proper talent and promise. The training of these schools was long, partly spent in acquiring technique of treating subjects and the mastery of the lyre, and partly in memorizing the Homeric and Hesiodic hymns. It is supposed that these poems were transmitted for more than three centuries orally in this way, before having been reduced to writing.

In Hesiod's poem of "The Shield of Hercules" (Bank's translation, 365), the general idea of the Greek festive processions is illustrated:

"There men in dances and in festive joys Held revelry. Some on the smooth-wheeled car A virgin bride conducted; then burst forth Aloud the marriage song; and far and wide Long splendors flash'd from many a quivering torch Borne in the hands of slaves. Gay blooming girls Preceded, and the dancers followed blithe: These, with shrill pipe indenting the soft lip, Breath'd melody, while broken echoes thrill'd Around them; to the lyre with flying touch Those led the love-enkindled dance. A group Of youths was elsewhere imaged, to the flute Disporting; some in dances, and in song; In laughter others. To the minstrel's flute So pass'd they on; and the whole city seem'd As fill'd with pomps, with dances, and with feasts."