Chapter 1 - Music in Ancient Greece and Early Christian Rome

History of Western Music: Begins with ancient civilizations in Greece and Rome.

Limited surviving works: Only about forty-five Greek songs and hymns, but sources coincide with writings, images (paintings, sculptures), and artifacts.

Music in Ancient Greece - integral to religious ceremonies, popular entertainment, and dramatic performances

Greek music theory - passed onto Romans, forming the foundation of Western Music Theory. Cultured individuals were educated in music.

Greek Mythology and Music: Music had divine origins. Gods and demigods were considered music inventors/practitioners.

Apollo, Amphion, and Orpheus: Gods associated with music's magical powers

Music’s magical powers: could heal sickness, purify the body and mind, and perform miracles.

Extant Greek Music: Surviving Greek music was primarily monophonic.

Surviving Greek music - Often embellished with instruments, resulting in heterophony, almost entirely improvised, and intimately linked to poetry, in fact, they were essentially synonymous with each other

Philosophical Views: Philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, explored music's influence on ethics and education.

The belief: gymnastics disciplines the body, but music disciplines the mind

Plato - endorsed Dorian and Phrygian modes for fostering temperance and courage, while excluding others.

Aristotle - believed music could be used for both enjoyment and education and that negative emotions could be purged through music and drama.

Both Plato and Aristotle - disapproved of changing established musical conventions, as lawlessness in art could lead to anarchy.

Pythagorean view: music is governed by mathematical laws, as humanity was kept in harmony by numerical relationships. Music was viewed as inseparable from numbers, which were seen as the key to the universe

Harmonic Elements of the time: Laid the foundation for modern musical concepts. Intervals combined into scales, consonant intervals were the 4th, 5th, and the octave.

Tetrachord: principal building block of the scale.

Genera of tetrachords: diatonic, chromatic, enharmonic.

 Harmonia: Unification of parts into an orderly whole; encompassed the structure of society and the universe.

Theory of imitation: music that imitates ethos arouses the same ethos in the listener

Harmonic elements in Ancient Rome: took musical culture from Greece, having lyric poetry often sung. Music was part of most public ceremonies, grandiose music festivals, and more. When the economy declined in the 3rd and 4th centuries, so did the use of music.

Transmission of Greek music theory

• Martianus Capella's The Marriage of Mercury and Philology described the seven liberal arts in the early 5th century. Rehashed the same concepts that Pythagoras had come up with.

• Boethius (ca. 480–ca. 524) was the most revered music authority in the Middle Ages.

• Die institutione musica (The Fundamentals of Music) - was widely copied and cited for the next thousand years.

• Music was seen as the science of: numbers, where numerical ratios and proportions determined intervals, consonances, scales, and tuning.

• Division of liberal arts included:

  • the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric)

  • the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and harmonics/music).

Early Christian Church: Christian communities incorporated features of Greek music.

Mass - commemorates the Last Supper, imitating the Passover meal.

Singing psalms - assigned to certain days.

Psalms and hymns - the earliest recorded musical activity of Jesus and his followers.Texts remained more stable than melodies.

Chant Dialects: Regional differences produced distinct liturgies.

• Melodies for singing sacred texts in Latin: chant. Examples: Gallican, Beneventan, Old Roman, Visigothic (Mozarabic), Ambrosian.

• Local chant dialects - disappeared over time or were absorbed into the Roman Catholic Church.

Gregorian Chant: A repertory of melodies.

In the 9th century - Frankish monks and nuns copied manuscripts, meaning thousands of chant melodies survive.

Music from the Ancient World (Summary): Single melodic line. Scientifically based acoustical theory in the making.

• Vocal melody - linked with the rhythm and meter of words.

• Performances - memorized or improvised.

• Philosophers - viewed music as an orderly system.

• Scales - built on tetrachords.

• Musical terminology - well-developed

• The Church Fathers - held to Plato's principle that beautiful things exist to remind us of divine beauty, thus music was a servant of religion.