chapter 1 music in ancient greece
TRANSCRIPT
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CHAPTER 1
Music in Ancient Greece
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Landmarks In Greek History And Culture
MAP OF ANCIENT GREECE
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Innovations of the Ancient Greeks
• Democratic Institutions
• Modes of critical thoughts
• Music of Western Civilization begins here
• Western drama begins with plays of Sophocles and other Greek playwrights.
• Philosophy begins with Socrates and Plato
• Modern Olympics descend from the Greeks
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Music in Greek SocietyTHE PARTHENON
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Music in Greek Society
• Music sets rhythm of Greek life with:– Drinking songs, love songs, wedding songs
funeral dirges, and hymns for Gods.
• Songs may have been performed by a– Chorus– Solo singer– Accompanied by a musical instrument
(lyre, kithara, or aulos)
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Greek Musical Instruments
• Lyre: a medium-sized instrument usually fitted with seven strings of sheep gut and plucked by a plectrum of metal or bone.
• Kithara: a very large lyre, also with seven strings, but with a resonator at the bottom made of wood rather than a tortoise
shell.• Aulos: a wind instrument fitted with a round single
reed or a flat double reed.
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Music in the Theatre
• Greek theater usually employed two to three actors and an all-male chorus (15).
• Chorus was extremely important– comments & moralizes about action occurring on
stage (as it does later in Baroque opera).
• Two papyrus scraps of two plays by Euripides (d. 406 B.C.E.) are all that remain of Greek theater music (Stasimon chorus from Orestes)
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Euripides: Orestes, Stasimon Chorus (c.408 B.C.E.)
What vengeful Demon thus with footstep dread,
Trampling the blood-polluted ground,
Sternly cruel joys to spread
Horror, rage, and madness round?
Woe, woe is me! In man’s frail state
Nor height nor greatness firm abides.
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EURIPIDES: ORESTES, STASIMON CHORUS
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Early Greek Musical Notation
• Early Greek music clearly indicates pitches and sets musical duration:
– Chronos (eighth note) – basic unit of time.
– Diseme (quarter note) – two chronoi’s worth
– Triseme (dotted quarter) – three chronoi’s worth which was also a triplet unit.
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Private Festivities: The Symposium
• Symposium – a tightly organized social
gathering in which adult males came together for conversation &
entertainment (after-dinner drinking party).
• Skolion – a song setting of a brief lyrical poem.
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Seikilos: Skolion or Epitaph (first century C.E.) – “As long as
you live”
1. As long as you live, shine
2. Grieve you not at all
3. Life is of brief duration
4. Time demands its end
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SEIKILOS, EPITAPH
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Ethical Power of Music
• Greeks believed music could affect human behavior.
• Plato declares music the most powerful of the arts – to change behavior, change music.
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Music of the Spheres
• Pythagoras (c580-480 B.C.E.): believed that the essence of the universe could be found in music and number.
• Music of the spheres – belief that when the stars and planets rotated in balanced proportions, they made heavenly music.
(persists until the time of Shakespeare)
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Greek Ratios for a Scale
• Greeks generated notes of scale by using basic ratios of:
2:1 (octave)
3:2 (fifth)
4:3 (fourth)
9:8 (whole tone)
• This developed a system of dividing octave into seven pitches (five whole tones and two semi-tones). This does not change until the 14th Cent.
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• Monochord – a single string instrument which Greeks divided into intervals of an octave, fifth, fourth, & whole-step.
• Tetrachord – a succession of four pitches
which was the building block of the scale.
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Greater Perfect System• Greeks had neither musical staff, nor note
heads, nor clefs; they only spoke in terms
of intervallic relationships.
• Greater Perfect System – the framework
of the Greek two-octave scale (made up
of four tetrachords).