Euripides the Posthumously Popular Avant-Garde Composer
The latter decades
of the fifth century saw marked changes in musical sounds, practices, and
contexts of performance. Contemporary observers, as well as later conservative
critics such as Plato, characterized the changes as a musical revolution. The
theatrical genres of dithyramb and tragedy were the focus of the stylistic
changes that we now refer to as the “New Music,” and Euripides, along with
Agathon and the notorious musician Timotheus of Miletus were its foremost
advocates and practitioners.
An anecdote in
Satyrus’ Life of Euripides attests to a professional association of
Euripides with Timotheus :“When Timotheus was [being scorned } by the Greeks
for his musical innovation and was so deeply dispirited that he had decided to
kill himself, Rip alone ridiculed the audiences in turn, and perceiving how
great a composer Timotheus was in his sphere of art, he encouraged him with the
most reassuring words and even collaborated with him in composing the prelude
to his “The Persians” with the result that Timotheus took the prize and ceased
to be rejected. The account may be biographically unreliable----Euripides’
relationship with Tim may have even been one of rivalry rather than
cooperation---but the story indicates the way that the two avant-garde practitioners
were linked in popular imagination.
The penchant for
novelty so strikingly demonstrated by Euripides in his verbal style, meters,
and plots extended to the music he composed for his tragedies. This is confirmed by the evidence of
Aristophanes, who throughout his comedies engages in ceaseless poetic rivalry
with Rip, parodying, imitating, and citing his scenarios, plots and expressions
( the comic poet Cadmus
euripidaristophanizein, “to Euripid-Aristophanize” to characterize the
verbal virtuosity evident in both poets.)
Aristophanes’
comic parody of Euripides extended to imitation and critiquing his perceived
musical excesses. In Frogs of 405 BC Aristophanes put “Euripides” onstage I the
underworld ( he had recently died in Macedon) competing with Aeschylus for the
prize of tragedy, judged by Dionysus in his comic incarnation. In a passage in
which “Aeschylus” contrasts his own decourous musical practices with those of
“Rip” the main criticism he levels at his rival is that he is indiscriminate in
the way he mixes high and low genres of song:
This fellow takes his material from all
over: whore songs,
Drinking songs by Meletus, Carian pipe
tunes,
Dirges and dances. I’ll demonstreate it
soon enough---
Someone bring my lyre! Mind you, who needs
A lyre for this? Where’s that woman with
the potsherds,
The one who plays on them. Oh Muse of
Euripides, come here.
You’re the right person to sing these
songs! ( Frogs 1301-1307.)
There is plenty of
later evidence on the music of Euripides being, like his plays, more popular
after his death then during his lifetime. There is that famous story, related
in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, how knowledge of Euripidean lyric was
instrumental in effecting the release from slavery of Greek prisoners in
Sicily; how starving soldiers received food and drink in exchange for singing
what songs of his they knew; how the Caunians allowed a ship pursued by pirates
to harbour in their port after finding out that the men on board were well
versed in Euripidean ἄιcματα (cf. Plut. Nic. 29.2-3). Whether or not all this
is true it would be impossible to say. But the popular appeal of his songs is
unquestionably confirmed by papyri containing the remains of Hellenistic
anthologies of Euripidean lyrics and references to ‘concert performances’ of
his songs in non-theatrical contexts.
Pseudo-Psellus On Tragedy 5.39 provides
the following account of how Euripidean melody diverged technically from that
of earlier tragedians: “The music of early tragedy uses the unmixed enharmonic
genus and a genus created by mixing the enharmonic and diatonic genera, but
none of the tragedians until Euripides appears to have made use of the
chromatic genus. The character of this genus is soft.” We aren’t sure what he
means by “soft.”
Of the modes
(tonoi) ancient tragedy mainly uses what they called the Dorian and Mixolydian
the former because it is suited to solemnity
the latter because it is associated with mourning ( See my earlier blog
post, Lament 101. But tragedy also used the so-called free or loose modes
(harmoniai) the Ionian and “the free Lydian.” Euripides seems to have been the
first to use a large range of notes and wide interval skips: this style of
music was called “gapped” by ancient musicians. Think Eric Dolphy if he played
an aulos.
The modes were in simple terms, systems of tuning analogous to modern scales,
although special modes were thought to have almost ethical effects. The so
called “genera” modified the effects of these “scales,” altering the pattern of
intervals, like harmonic versus melodic minor. So what did they mean by enharmonic,
diatonic and chromatic? The enharmonic,
which was considered the oldest and “original” genus, made use of fine pitch
differences ( i.e. quarter-tones). Toward the end of the 5th
century music composed in this style was
considered increasingly old-fashioned, and was giving way to melodies created
with less subtle half-tones (for the chromatic genus) and whole tones (the
diatonic genus) . The diatonic genus was felt to impart a “sweeter” sound that was heard as gratifying to vulgar
tastes. The manner in which modulation (changing keys, modes, etc.) employed by
Eurpides and Timotheus also appears to have been, or been felt as, considerably
more unrestrained than earlier
composers.
Performances of classical tragedies were musical events more
akin to a modern opera or musical than to a theater play. The inherent
metricality of the ancient Greek language gives rhythm a special claim to
importance when considering ancient music. The allusions to music and to
musical instruments lend a number of the choral passages in which they occur a
self-referential quality, sometimes with unmistakable implications for the
song's performance. A much-debated question in Greek musical scholarship has
been the question of how and to what extent the melodic shape was dictated or
influenced by the pitch accents intrinsic to the pronunciation of Greek words.
Greek music found on papyri and inscriptions dating from the third century BCE
on exhibit a high degree of correspondence between melody and pitch accent, and
evidence from other pitched languages show that correspondence of this kind is
not uncommon.
Next:
Rip rapped in iambic trimeter, but wrote songs in meters appropriate to the
emotions being expressed by his characters. Try typing TRIMETER without spell
correction making it into TRIMESTER.
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