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ANCIENT GREEK | | NEN M.L. WEST Ancient Greek Music Ancient Greek Music M.L. WEST CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dares Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © M. L. West 1992 First issued as a Clarendon Paperback 1994 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data West, M. L. (Martin Litchfield), 1937- Ancient Greek music / M.L. West. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Music, Greek and Roman. I. Title. ML169.W5 1992 780’ .938—dc20 91-5170 ISBN 0-19-814897-6 ISBN 0-19-814975-1 (Pbk) 13579108642 Typeset by Joshua Associates Ltd, Oxford Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King’s Lynn PREFACE My interest in the subject goes back to my second year as an under- graduate, when, browsing in J. U. Powell’s corpus of fragments of Hellenistic verse, Collectanea Alexandrina, I was surprised to come upon several pages of music. They revealed themselves to be transcriptions of the two Delphic Paeans which are our most sub- stantial specimens of ancient melody. I committed one of them to memory, and the next spring, when I went to Greece for the first time, on arriving at Delphi I sang it at the top of my voice in the ruins of the sanctuary where it had had its premiere 2,084 springs pre- viously. My two travelling companions distanced themselves some- what. A little later, as we examined the stone on which the text is inscribed, one of them stumbled against it, and it nearly crashed from its moorings and shattered. (I married her all the same.) In the hope that the book may be of interest not only to classicists but also to musicologists, and indeed anyone with an interest in the history of music, I have tried to avoid allusions that might be unintel- ligible to one or the other group. There are bound to be mentions of ancient authors, places, and institutions that will be unfamiliar to non-classicists, but where I have left them unelucidated they should be inessential to the argument. Reference works such as The Oxford Classical Dictionary or Mrs M. Howatson’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature will assist in most cases. All quotations from ancient sources are given in translation, and any Greek words appear in transliteration. Almost no musical knowledge is presup- posed. I am indebted to Dr A. C. Baines, the former Curator of the Bate Collection of Historical Wind Instruments at Oxford, for encourage- ment and advice on various questions that arose in connection with Chapter 4; to Dr Günter Poethke of the Agyptisches Museum in Berlin for important information concerning the musical papyrus that resides there; to Stephanie West for examining the same and answering a series of my queries about its text; to Professor W. G. Arnott, Professor Sir John Boardman, Professor J. N. Coldstream, Dr P. A. Hansen, Dr J. G. F. Hind, and Dr B. B. Rasmussen (Curator of Classical Antiquities in the National Museum of Denmark) for vi Preface help with various questions; to Professor A. D. Trendall for permission to reproduce a plate from his book Early South Italian Vase Painting, published by Philipp von Zabern of Mainz, 1974; and to authorities of the following institutions for photographs and permis- sions: the Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam; the National Museum of Greece; the British School at Athens; Münzen und Medaillen AG, Basle; the Antikenmuseum and Staatliche Museen, Berlin; the Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'His- toire, Brussels; the National Museum of Denmark; the Ruhrland Museum, Essen; the Museo Archeologico Etrusco, Florence; the Archaeological Museum, Heraklion; the British Museum; the Staat- liche Antikensammlungen, Munich; the Museo Nazionale and Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Museo della Villa Giulia, Rome. My thanks to them all; and, very far from least, to the produc- tion staff of the Oxford University Press for the effort they have devoted to a rather demanding book. M.L.W. All Souls College, Oxford January 1992 CONTENTS List of Plates Vill List of Figures Abbreviations Introduction 1. Music in Greek Life The Voice t w Stringed Instruments n Wind and Percussion b r Rhythm and Tempo 129 u o Scales and Modes 160 Melody and Form 190 v Theory 218 Notation and Pitch 254 Ee © The Musical Documents 277 E mÓ . Historical Synthesis: 1. Sunrise and Forenoon 327 12. Historical Synthesis: 2. High Noon and Afternoon 356 Epilogue: Greece between Europe and Asia 386 Select Bibliography 391 Index 401 LISTOFPLATES between pp. 210 and 211 Private sacrificial procession T Processions of dancers and musicians N Merry costumed dancers with piper D P Citharode mounting the competition podium Panathenaic procession U A piper accompanies a symposiast as he sings a piece of elegiac A verse Women making music . Women making bread, entertained by a piper . Marching warriors with piper . Athletes with pipers . Athenian school scene . Man with kithara and dancers . Seated minstrel . Citharode . Girl or Muse with round-based kithara . Satyr chorus with ‘Thracian’ kitharas . Pair of auloi, crested harp, and rectangular, ‘Italiote’ kithara . Young men playing tortoise-shell lyres . Alcaeus and Sappho holding barbitoi Citharode tuning his lyre as he mounts the podium . Muse holding auloi, another playing a harp, Musaeus holding a lyra, and a round-based kithara . Woman with triangular harp . Girl holding a sambyke (?) . Woman playing a lute . Piper wearing a phorbeia . The Reading aulos . The aulete Pronomus . Satyr with panpipe and bagpipe . Panpipes . Scythian archer blowing a trumpet . Young man piping, courtesan dancing with castanets