The musical history of the Greeks may be divided into two great periods, the historical, and the mythological. The mythological period covers the entire range of traditions and legends, and extends up to the time when the Greeks began to reckon by Olympiads, or periods of four years, the date of the first Olympiad being 776 B.C. From 776 B.C. to 161 A.D. is the historical period.
To the mythological period belong the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice. Perhaps the noblest and most beautiful of all the fairy tales of art, the building of Thebes and Cadmea by Amphion, who by his playing supposedly caused the stones and rocks to move spontaneously. The contest between the myth of the Sirens, Apollo and Marsyas, and numberless other stories and traditions with which the Hellenic mind loved to surround, as with many garlands, the art of music.
The poet Homer, provides us with a link between the traditional and historical periods, and in the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are to be found both legend and exact information.
Coming to the historical period proper of Greek music, we cannot fail to be impressed with the broadly moral significance which music possessed for the Greeks. Among the Assyrians, it is to be imagined, music was more or less emotional in character. Among the Egyptians, it apparently shared of the nature of an occult philosophy. Among the Israelites, music was primarily an act of worship; and it is, therefore, to the Greeks that the credit of being the first to recognise that music was highly valuable as an educational resource.
Although not yet an independent art, music probably gained very nearly as much as it lost in this respect, by being made an essential part of the literary and dramatic genius of Greece. Thus, the Greek play resembled more an opera than a play, however, with the music strictly subdued in favour of more dramatic interest. Perhaps the simplest way of making clear the musical aspect of the Greek drama would be to say that a Greek play was like an opera of which the composer wrote the libretto and the librettist wrote the music.
Sometimes the Greek dramatist, as in the case of GEschylus, composed the music to his own life. Sophocles also accompanied the performance of one of his plays upon the cithara (an instrument of the harp kind).
Other than fragments of musical work, which it would be difficult to absolutely accept as authentic, there are no musical compositions of the ancient Greeks now known to be in existence. There has been preserved, however, a considerable body of Greek literature upon the subject of music, including the theoretical writings of Aristoxenus (B.C. 300), Euclid (B.C. 277), Nicho-machus (A.D. 60), Alypius (A.D. 115), Bacchius (A.D. 140), Aristides Quintilianus (A.D. no), and others.
Of these Aristoxenus wrote upon the Elements of Harmonics, Euclid wrote an Introduction, to Harmonics, Nichomachus an Introduction to Harmony, Alypius a work on musical notation, Bacchius, supposed to have been tutor to the Emperor Antoninus, was the author of a short Introduction to Music, in dialogue form. Aristides Quintilianus wrote a treatise, "De Musica," in three books.
These writers, and others, have perpetuated the theoretical systems of the Greeks. Although they give us little or no hint of the practical application of the same, and it is upon their works that the earliest theorists of Europe based their further efforts towards the construction of a musical system at once logical, scientific, and capable of allowing the emotional side of man's musical nature free play.
The musical compositions of Palestrina, and the reforms he was able to make in Church music, could be said to mark the end of the early ages of Christian musical art. We have now come to an important turning point in musical history, but before going further, it will be useful to take a quick survey of the period we are leaving behind.
So far, the great outstanding feature of musical history is the tremendous influence exercised by the Church. In the early ages of musical history, knowledge was almost exclusively the property of the Church, and many centuries passed before musical art began to separate from the Churches influence.
In music, this religious influence was stronger than in any other department of art or letters. With the institution of the Church modes, music was separated from the other concerns of life. Just as literature and science had Latin for their special language. What we might call art music had its own code of expression in the Church modes.
From the time of the earliest enactments concerning Church music, the limits within which any composition must be kept were very clearly defined. The nature of the restrictions thus placed upon composers is illustrated by the following extract from Dr. Hubert Parry's Art of Music:-
"As each complete piece of music was subject to the rule of some special mode, all the sentiments were restricted by its characteristics. If it was what a modern musician would call minor in character, the musical expression for the "Gloria" had to be got out of it as much as that for the "Miserere". And though the use of accidentals modified modal restrictions to a certain extent, it was not sufficient to obviate the fact that in detail a piece of music had to follow the rule and character of the mode, rather than the sentiment of the words."
Thus far, history displays the progress of music within these limitations. We see its development in the advance from the earliest forms of Christian hymnology. Through the crude attempts at part writing of Hucbald and his successors.
The constantly increasing acquirements of the different schools, to the works of Palestrina and his contemporaries, in which we have the scholarship of the greater among the Netherland masters combined with that innate melodiousness peculiar to the Italian in all ages. With Palestrina, we see music perfect and beautiful in some few things, largely, because so many other things were shut out from its reach.
We come now to a period when the barriers surrounding music were to be broken down, and when musicians, tired of being the limited by purely religious compositions and trapped by the requirements of the Church modes, turned from somewhat monotonous beauty within a limited area, to grapple with fresh problems in a wider field.
The period, which we have now to consider may, for the sake of convenience, is styled that of the Renaissance. It is true that, chronologically, this musical Renaissance does not quite tally with the Renaissance proper; but still, inasmuch as we have to deal with the fundamental principles of Renaissance art, manifesting themselves in music at a time later than in painting, sculpture, architecture, or literature, the term is apt enough.
The Renaissance was that intellectual movement or impulse, generated in Europe through the dissemination of the treasures of classical literature by savants and philosophers. Greeks for the most part, and subjects of the Byzantine empire, who fled from Constantinople when that city, the last stronghold of the Caesars, and refuge of the learning of the ancient world, was sacked by its Mohammedan conquerors in 1453, and with the Emperor Constantine Palaeologus, the long line of the Emperors of the East came to an end.
The first nation with which these refugees came into contact in their flight westward was Italy, and in Italy, the Renaissance movement had its origin.
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