Music - PowerPoint Presentation

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Music in Classical Antiquity

Roots of Western musical ideas

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ca. 500 BCE – 500 CE Slide2

“Golden Age” in fifth

century BCE

— Pericles, AcropolisSciencePythagoras (ca. 500 BCE) — fundamentals of acousticsEuclid (ca. 300 BCE) – studied mathematics of musicLiterature — included musicmyth and epic — Homer (ca. 800 BCE)tragedy — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (fifth century BCE)comedy – AristophanesPhilosophy — includes consideration of place of music in lifeSocrates (end of fifth century BCE) Plato, Aristotle (fourth century BCE)

GreeceSlide3

Some uses of music in ancient Greece

Song

, narrative literature (Homer), drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides)Religious ritual — source of dramaCompetitions — Olympic competitionSlide4

Philosophical principle: ethos

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music affects characterApplicationsreligion — cults of Apollo, Dionysuseducation to virtuepoliticsSources in styleinstrumentation — kithara, aulosrhythmpitch relationships (Plato and Aristotle: harmonia, translated “mode”)named for geographic or ethnic entitiesboth theoretical and aesthetic conceptSlide5

Plato on music in the Republic

The overseers must be watchful against its insensible corruption. They must throughout be watchful against innovations in music and gymnastics counter to the established order, and to the best of their power guard against them, fearing when anyone says that that song is most regarded among men “which hovers newest on the singer’s lips” [Odyssey i. 351], lest it be supposed that the poet means not new songs but a new way of song and is commending this. But we must not praise that sort of thing nor conceive it to be the poet’s meaning. For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions. (Republic 424b–c)Slide6

Plato and the modes

– We said we did not require dirges and lamentations in words.

– We do not. – What, then, are the dirgelike modes of music? Tell me, for you are a musician. – The mixed Lydian, he said, and the tense or higher Lydian, and similar modes. – These, then, said I, we must do away with. But again, drunkenness is a thing most unbefitting guardians, and so is softness and sloth. – Yes. – What, then, are the soft and convivial modes? – There are certain Ionian and also Lydian modes that are called lax. – Will you make any use of them for warriors? – None at all, he said, but it would seem that you have left the Dorian and the Phrygian. Slide7

– I don’t know the musical modes, I said, but leave us the mode that would fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed, either meeting wounds or death or having fallen into some other mishap, in all these conditions confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes. And another for such a man engaged in works of peace, not enforced but voluntary, either trying to persuade somebody of something and imploring him

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whether it be a god, through prayer, or a man, by teaching and admonition — or contrariwise yielding himself to another who is petitioning him or teaching him or trying to change his opinions, and in consequence faring according to his wish, and not bearing himself arrogantly, but in all this acting modestly and moderately and acquiescing in the outcome. Leave us these two modes — the enforced and the voluntary — that will best imitate the utterances of men failing or succeeding, the temperate, the brave — leave us these. – Well, said he, you are asking me to leave none other than those I just spoke of. (Republic 398d–399c)Slide8

Music in Roman antiquity

Roman dominance from 146 BCE

— Julius Caesar (d. 44 BCE) — to fall of empire in 476 CELiteratureVirgil (first century BCE) — poet, AeneidTerence (second century CE) — comedies adapted from Greek theaterScience Pliny the Elder (first century CE) — natural historyPtolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus, second century CE) — mathematics, astronomy, geography — included music theorySlide9

Music in Rome

Adapted

from Greece — tendency to virtuosity and professionalismMilitary applications — development of brass instrumentsCivic function — organSlide10

Roman ideas about music education

Martianus Capella

(fifth century CE) — music in the seven liberal arts (preceding philosophy)Trivium — grammar, rhetoric, dialectic (logic)Quadrivium — arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomySlide11

Roman ideas about music education

Boethius (ca. 480-524 CE),

De institutione musicaMusica speculativa rather than musica practica — musicus rather than cantorThreefold division of musicmundana — harmonious order of cosmos, naturehumana — harmony in human lifeinstrumentalis — harmonic relationships in audible manifestationsSlide12

For discussion

In what ways are discussions of the issues of ethos and music’s power for supporting or undermining moral values still current?

How important is music in modern education? How has this changed since the periods of Plato and Aristotle, Capella, and Boethius?How has the understanding of the therapeutic value of music developed between the Greek philosophers’ discussion of the doctrine of ethos and today’s practice of music therapy?