MUSIC: MUSIC AND RELIGION IN GREECE, ROME, AND BYZANTIUM

This survey of the interrelation of religion and music in Western antiquity from the Homeric age to the age of Justinian (c. 1000 bce–500 ce) will examine the religious dimensions of the music of Greece and Rome, the music of the early church, and the liturgical music of Byzantium.

Greek Music

The word music (mousikē ) originated in the Greek language. However, to the Greeks it meant more than the art of tones sung or played on instruments. It encompassed education, science, and proper behavior, as well as singing and the playing of instruments. To modern man this ancient music—the very little that has come down to us—sounds simple, unmelodious, and occasionally even dull, but in the broader conception of mousikē we may recognize the basis for the magical, ritual, and ethical dimensions that characterize Greek music and relate it to Greek religion. This discussion of Greek music during the period from the Homeric epics (eighth century bce) to the age of the Roman emperor Augustus (first century bce) will treat, together with religious function, its theory, and main styles and forms.

Pre-Christian Greek religions

Greek religions were polytheistic and based upon popular mythologies. Followers of Homeric religion adored and feared the Olympian gods, who frequently behaved like humans, possessed of very human virtues and vices. Their cult was sacrificial, and its liturgy proceeded by sacrificial action. Sacrifice served in rituals of atonement, imprecation, and thanksgiving, in ceremonies for the dead, and in the fearful adoration of the chthonic divinities of the netherworld. Its aims were gratification of the gods and apotropaic protection from adversary gods or demonic forces. In the seventh and sixth centuries bce Orphism arose, a mystic movement taking as founder the fabled musician Orpheus. Closely related to Orphism, and also originating in Thrace, was the cult of Dionysos, which worshiped with wine and song in wild bacchanalia its god Dionysos-Bacchus. Beginning with the fifth century bce and thereafter, a more philosophical, less ecstatic type of religion emerged under the impact of Pythagorean, Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic philosophies. Connection with ethical principles characterized this conception of religion. We may see it in the still polytheistic context of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy in Antigone's defense of "the infallible, unwritten eternal laws of heaven, which no mortal can overrule." Socrates, who lived by this doctrine, like Sophocles' heroine, paid with his life. Yet Socrates' teachings were carried on by Plato, whose systematization of Socratic thought wholly reshaped Greek religion.

Musical principles

From earliest times the Greeks took interest in the theory of music, and subsequent to Pythagorean concern with the mathematico-philosophical aspects of music they occupied themselves with it continuously. Their most important achievements were their acoustic discoveries, which were basic to the development of Western music.

From the infinity of tones, sounds, and rhythms with which nature surrounds man, the Greeks selected a limited number of tones, which they ordered, identified, and categorized according to harmoniai, or species of scales. In Greek music theory the term harmony refers to the various divisions of the octave into scales. The Greeks knew Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and other scales, each of which consisted of two conjunct or disjunct tetrachords. Tetrachords composing the scales were divided into three distinct genera: the harmonic, the chromatic, and the enharmonic. (Greek tetrachords and scales progressed downward from a higher tonic rather than upward as in medieval and modern music.) Scales were precise, mathematically constructed systems. The scope of these harmoniai, however, was much greater than that of simple scales. The Doric "harmony" was the yardstick by which all melodies were judged. Its strict simplicity was understood as the ideal of moral straightforwardness, indeed, of Spartan fortitude and austerity. Within their various scales, the Greeks also knew certain tropes (tropoi ), which characterized the mode of any given melody. The meaning of "mode" in Greek musical theory has been a matter of considerable scholarly debate; I take it to refer to complex melodic types or structures of melodic motives on the order of the Indian rāgas or Arabian maqamat.

The theory of tone-word relationship is basic to an understanding of Greek music. Poetry and music were closely bound, with the words of the text defining rhythmic structure through the quantities of metrical pattern. The role of stress or accent in relation to meter and music, controversial in late antiquity, remains problematic.

Magic power of music

The Greeks ascribed to music magic and therapeutic powers. It could heal wounds (Homer, Odyssey 19.437ff.), and it could move blocks of stone; the singing of Amphion, son of Zeus, was said to have enchanted stones to build of their own accord the walls of Thebes. The historical figure Thaletas of Gortyn (seventh century bce) tried to drive the plague from Sparta by singing.

Ritual use of music

I have referred to the rituals of sacrifice in Homeric religion. The first canto of the Iliad gives a good description of priestly thusia, or sacrifice, made by the priest Chryses to his god Apollo (1.447–473). After Chryses has burned pieces of meat and fat and tasted them, a libation is spent accompanied by song. Only the chthonic deities were adored in strict silence. Several ancient inscriptions, as that from Dodona, speak of the ritual of praying, or more properly "vowing," and sacrificing; on such occasions music, at least a kind of hymnic chant, was obligatory. The dedication of a new temple was always a festivity during which vows and sacrifices were offered and hymns or other music heard. At marriages thusia, prayers, and hymns inaugurated a happy espousal, at least in the circles of the nobility, as we read in Apollonis of Rhodes (fl. 222–181 bce).

The aforementioned tone-word relationship has special significance for the ritual use of music. Lamentations for the dead Hector show clearly certain ritualistic traits (Iliad 24.720ff.). The choric odes of Pindar (518–438 bce) served in official worship. Special reverence was paid the Delphic hymns; according to Plutarch (c. 46–after 120 ce), several were so celebrated that they were repeated every year.

The musical ēthos

To the Greeks, mousikē meant more than mere music. Hence it was judged not only by its audible beauty but also by its moral effect upon the listener. This principle, which the Greeks shared with many great ancient civilizations, constituted the doctrine of ēthos ; in Greek music theory this doctrine reached its highest expression.

There was extensive philosophical reflection upon musical ēthos, that is, the character, nature, or moral effect of a musical work. Every melody, in each of its aspects, was subject to the postulates of its ēthos ; the ēthos was determined by all components of its respective melody. Each scale, rhythm, and trope, when performed at the "right" spot and at the "just" time, has a concrete, predictable influence on the listener's emotions, behavior, and character.

Plato gave the doctrine of ēthos its most radical formulation in his Republic. According to his thesis, certain scales turn men into cowards and make women unable to bear healthy children; other scales inspire courage, fear, piety, nobility, and so forth (376d, 398b ff.). In the Laws, it is really in terms of the doctrine of ēthos that he criticizes the professional music of his day (700a ff.). The nomos, literally the "law" or "set," had become the main form used by professional singer-composers in musical contests. Consisting of several movements without strophic repetition, and characterized by its harmonia and its specific rhythm as musical representation of meter, it might depict the exploits of some god, such as the famous Pythian nomos, which glorified Apollo's battle with the Pythian dragon. Plato decried the musical license that violated the laws (nomoi ) dividing music into several distinct kinds. The hymn, the lament, the paean, the dithyramb, and the lyric song, each ought be true to its form. Their admixture could only bring disorder to the society in which such confused and irregular music was heard.

The philosophy of musical ēthos did not remain undisputed. Its sharpest opponents were Philodemus of Gadara (first century bce) and an anonymous rhetorician, a sophist whose arguments have come down to us in the Papyrus Hibbeh. Even Plutarch, the historian of Greek music, and Aristoxenus (fourth century bce), its main theorist, speak in rather cautious terms about the doctrine of ēthos. Despite these controversies, the ēthos doctrine was cultivated by the Neoplatonists and by the church fathers and was championed by as influential a philosopher as Boethius.

Tragedy as musical drama

Attic tragedy originated in ritual, especially in that of Dionysos. The term tragedy derives from tragōidia, or "song of the goat," in celebration of a totemistic element in the Dionysian cult. The link between tragedy and ritual is clearly discernible in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles; it is less intimate in those of Euripides, the poet of the Greek enlightenment.

The ritual origin of tragedy is well known. Less known are the philosophical treatises devoted to its meaning, parts, and effects, and to the music that best represented the ēthos of the drama and its protagonists. According to Aristotle's celebrated Poetics, an effective drama has six parts, among which the melopoia, or musical composition, was not the least important. In its heyday, the tragedy contained a number of musical forms: the entrance of the choir (parodos ), the standing song (stasimon ), the song of the choir's exit (exodos ), a song with pantomime (huporchēma ), a lament (kommos ), and the chanted recitatives of the main actors. Certain harmoniai were preferred for the drama, for example, the Mixolydian, because of its sorrowful ēthos, and the Doric, because of its solemn character.

Musical instruments

The musical instruments most significant for Greek religious practice may be named briefly. The main instruments were the lyre and its variants, such as the kithara, barbitos, phorminx, trigōnon, and psaltērion. They were all stringed instruments, to be plucked with or without a plectrum. The harp was probably imported from Egypt. They served chiefly the highly regulated Apollonian rite or style, which eschewed all ecstatic or orgiastic expression. Their music was strict, even severe; they were used by priests and the nobility. The hymns of Pindar, composed for accompaniment by lyre, were sacred to Apollo.

More appropriate to the unrestrained Dionysian style were such wind instruments as the aulos, a shrill-sounding primitive clarinet that was usually played as a double instrument with two mouthpieces. Sacred to Dionysos, it engendered violent merriment, wild breast-beating, or hopeless mourning. The distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian thus marks contrasting currents both musical and religious.

Relics of Greek music

Fifteen pieces of Greek music are known, of which three were carved in stone (two of these were found in Delphi and one in Tralles, in Asia Minor). Most of these pieces are only fragments. Their transcription into modern notation is, in certain details, controversial. An example of one of those carved in stone is the skolion, or libation song, of Seikilos, originating in the first century bce.

Roman Music

No written musical document of the early days of Roman history has come down to us; we must depend upon archaeological evidence. Ancient Rome was built upon three civilizations: Etruscan, Greek, and, finally, Near Eastern. In general Greek music came to Rome as a study to be learned and exercised. Eventually the powerful influence of Hellenistic music began to recede as the influence of Egyptian, Syrian, and Hebrew music increased.

Pre-Christian Roman religions

Roman cultic and popular customs were invariably accompanied by chanted and played music. Thus, according to the first-century historian Livy, the sodalities of the Salian priesthood regularly used chants at their rites. Numa, the legendary second king of Rome, provided the Salii, or "leapers," with arms and decreed that they chant hymns and dance at the appointed festivals of the martial god Mars. Their heavy-footed dance of arms in triple time was sacred to the god of war. Vergil (70–19 bce) indicates that the songs of the Salii were executed responsorially (Vergil, Aeneid 8.285). The precentor of the priests, the vates ("poet" or "seer"), was considered divinely inspired.

Under the leadership of Livius Andronicus, Roman poet of the third century bce, rites of atonement and consecration sacred to the goddess Juno were celebrated by choirs of virgins. Many of their hymns appear to have had apotropaic functions: to banish death, illness, and danger, and to establish peace between gods and mortals. The poet Horace (first century bce) refers to the function of the vates in such rites, asking, "Where would innocent boys and girls learn their prayers, had not the Muse granted them a poet?" The customarily noisy nenies, or lamentations, functioned according to the principle "The greater the noise, the greater the loss"; they were disliked by Horace and later Roman poets, who were inclined to prefer the refinement of Greek poetry.

Music and poetry

Statius, a poet of the first century ce, no less than the poet Catullus a generation before him, took for granted the chanted performance of his poems. The poet Horace was probably the best-trained musician of his day, for he was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to create the words and music of the Carmen saeculare. It appears that Horace also taught its melody to the choir. In the first century bce Greek dominance was as yet unchallenged, as evidenced by the existence of a Roman association, the Societas Cantorum Graecorum, yet Horace took pride in "having introduced Aeolian verses" to the culture of Rome.

Musical instruments

Because it had an expansive and militaristic culture, Rome used musical instruments more for its army than for its sanctuaries, although the ancient festivals, the Parilia and the Saturnalia, were certainly not celebrated without chants and popular music. The tibia, a primitive oboe comparable to the aulos ; the tuba, a kind of trumpet; the Greek kithara and lyre; and, later, Asiatic instruments such as the Phrygian curva tibia, were heard on many cultic occasions. Wind instrument players were organized into the union of tibicines, stringed instrument players into that of the fidicines. Noise-making rattles, cymbals, and so forth were played by corybants and priests at Bacchanalian revels and were also heard at funerals.

Musical importations

Mystery cults imported from Asia featured bloody rites of initiation accompanied by the wild sound of noisemaking instruments and the Phrygian tibia. From Persia, borne by the legionnaires, came the cult of Mithra, with its ceremony of blood-baptism. The rattling of sistrums and the tinkling of harps accompanied the more peaceful cult of Isis, imported from Egypt. This multitude of foreign sounds was, like the nenies, condemned by Horace and later writers.

Early Christian Music

Foreign musics and mythologies were a horror and an abomination to the early Christians, or, rather, Judeo-Christians of the first two centuries, as were any pagan practices. The question of influence by Roman popular songs upon the chants of the early church has been raised, but all too few facts in favor of such a hypothesis can be adduced. The first Latin Church Fathers were so strongly biased against anything that smacked of paganism that they may well have suppressed any real evidence. Further, the Romans did not invent a musical notation of their own, nor were they interested in musical theory, so that any question of influence is difficult to judge.

The last part of Augustine's philosophical work De musica is now lost; it may have contained important views about the music of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, we are in possession of many, often contradictory testimonies of Christian chant in the Roman Empire, as it originated in Greece, Palestine, Italy, and other parts of the empire. Among them is just one piece of notated music, the Oxyrhynchus hymnus, and a veritable host of descriptions, speculations, and comparisons, ancient and medieval. Possibly some oral traditions were preserved until the ninth century, during which time a musical notation was developed in Europe. Some insights have resulted from this—rarely authentic—material, mainly in modern studies. A few examples will illustrate the state of this research:

1. Hosanna filio David. This antiphon for Palm Sunday is of ancient origin. Amédée Gastoué ascribes its intonation to the resemblance of the word hosanna with hoson zēs, the beginning words of a libation song.
2. Tropos Spondeiakos. Clement of Alexandria, second-century Church Father, recommended in his work on Christian education, the Pedagogue, that Christians should sing psalms before retiring, as the Jews of Alexandria did, and mentioned the Tropos Spondeiakos, or mode of libation, as the most suitable one. Pseudo-Plutarch, a contemporary of Clement, described this Doric-spondaic mode in his book on music and thus made possible its reconstruction. Years ago, I demonstrated that this mode occurs in some of the oldest Christian chants (in Latin, Greek, and Syriac) and in ancient prayers of the Yemeni Jews (The Sacred Bridge, vol. 1, 1959).
3. The tune of the Te Deum. This tune belongs to the very same family of melodies as the Tropos Spondeiakos and is equally old.
4. Oxyrhynchus hymnus. Written in the third century, this work is a praise of Christ that paraphrases a passage from Psalm 93. It represents a perfect mixture of Greek syllabic chant and Hebrew melismatic elements. This interpenetration of Greek and Hebrew elements was characteristic of most chants before the fourth century, when the Council of Laodicea set certain theological standards, which determined the split between Eastern and Roman Catholic liturgies.

Early Christian music thus preserved Greek and Hebrew sources of influence. Emphasis on the Greek elements in this music was made mainly by Boethius in his De institutione musica. Peter Wagner, the great expert on Gregorian chant, submitted a number of explanations for the role of Judeo-Christians as transmitters of Hebrew musical tradition to early Christian chants. The epitaphs of Deusdedit (Jonathan) and Redemptus (Yigael), singers whom Pope Damasus brought to Rome from Jerusalem, contain such remarks as "he sounded his ancient prophet [David] in sweet songs."

Byzantine Music

While the Byzantine Empire was a well-defined entity both historically and geographically, its music belongs to its specific liturgy and so must be more closely circumscribed. The music of Byzantium will be sketched here as it developed in its first stage, from its origin in the fourth century during the reign of Constantine the Great until 565, the year of the death of Justinian I, who disbanded the Academy of Athens. The date is significant, for it marks the gradual separation of Byzantine culture from its Greek patrimony.

Music and Byzantine Christianity

We have no traces of early Byzantine secular music aside from reports of the great festivities held in honor of the emperor and his court, and about these noisy occasions we know most details from the tenth-century book of ceremonies by Constantine VII. No Byzantine music antedating the ninth century has come down to us. The term Byzantine music is, moreover, limited to liturgical chants. Although Syriac and Hebrew elements were probably integrated, definite evidence of these influences is not available, as the scholarship in this field is barely a hundred years old.

Musical notation

The Byzantine liturgy used two kinds of rhetorical notation. The first, the ancient ekphonetic notation, served the priests in reciting the sacred scriptures in a prescribed system of cantillation. Its connection with Syriac and Hebrew accents is quite obvious, as Egon Wellesz and I have shown. This kind of symbolism did not represent real musical pitches or intervals; instead, it punctuated the sentences and indicated pauses and the rise and fall of the voice. The second kind of notation was not established before the ninth century and so stands outside the scope of this description. This musical notation grew out of ekphonetic and rhetoric beginnings, and came to be applied to the chanted parts of the liturgy, especially to the troparia, centos of psalm verses and new poetry; the heirmologia, containing the models of traditional melodies; and the kanones, poetic paraphrases of nine biblical canticles: two songs of Moses, the prayer of Hannah, the prayer of Habakkuk, the hymn of Isaiah, the hymn of Jonah, the prayer of the three youths in the furnace, the apocryphal continuation of this prayer, and the Magnificat. The second ode was usually omitted in order to make a number equal to the eight modes, or ēchoi (Octoechos). From each of the original biblical texts, only a number of verses were chanted, and these were interwoven with poems by Byzantine authors.

The Octoechos

The Octoechos is a system of eight modes (originally not scales), whose names were erroneously borrowed from the classic Greek harmoniai. The concept of the Octoechos is very ancient; its origin has been linked to the Babylonian-Akkadian calendar. As a musical term, ʿal-ha-sheminit occurs in the superscriptions to two Hebrew psalms (sixth and twelfth) and, in the Greek literature, in Yohanan Rufos's sixth-century Plerophoriai. Under the name "Octoechos" many hymns of the Byzantine and Syrian churches were collected and ordered according to the eight modes and the seven-plus-one Sundays between Easter and Pentecost. Their texts were first published in about 540 by Severus, patriarch of Antioch. This work became the exemplar for many ritual books of the Byzantine Church. These books became repositories of an enormous number of liturgical melodies, whose influence enriched many of the chants of the Near East, even after the collapse of the empire in 1453.

See Also

Aristotle; Chanting; Dionysos; Orpheus; Plato; Pythagoras; Socrates.

Bibliography

For a full, mostly reliable study of Greek music, see "Greece, Ancient" by R. P. Winningham-Ingram and others in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie (London, 1980). For the advanced reader, Isobel Henderson's "Ancient Greek Music" in the New Oxford History of Music (Oxford, 1957) is recommended, although it neglects the Asiatic elements. Curt Sach's writings, especially his Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York, 1943), contain the best available scholarship on ancient music, easily readable by the layman. See also Edward A. Lippman's Musical Thought in Ancient Greece (New York, 1964). Hermann J. Abert's study of ēthos in Greek music, Die Lehre vom Ethos in der Musik des griechischen Altertums, 2d ed. (Tutzing, 1968) is still the best presentation of this difficult subject, but it requires some philosophical background. Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York, 1950), volume 1 of Source Readings in Music History, edited by Oliver Strunk, gives several Greek sources in good translation but is somewhat opinionated in its selection. My "The Origin of the Eight Modes in Music (Octoechos)," Hebrew Union College Annual 21 (1948): 211–255, presents most of the ancient sources of the system of musical modes.

For data on music in Rome, see "Rome, Ancient" by Günter Heischhauer in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. J. E. Scott's "Roman Music" in the New Oxford History of Music presents a solid and scholarly evaluation.

The first chapter in volume 1 of Karl Gustav Fellerer's The History of Catholic Music (Baltimore, 1961) offers discussion of early Christian music. See also my The Sacred Bridge, 2 vols. (New York, 1959–1984), which examines the interdependence of liturgy and music in the Jewish and Christian traditions during the first millennium.

For a complete survey of Byzantine music in all its aspects, see "Byzantine Rite, Music of the," by Kenneth Levy in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Egon Wellesz's A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1961) is the standard work on the subject. For the more advanced reader, Wellesz's study "Word and Music in Byzantine Liturgy," Musical Quarterly 23 (July 1937): 297–310, gives a fine presentation of the most problematic aspects. For the reader familiar with classical literature, Carsten Høeg's profound study "Les rapport de la musique chrétienne et de la musique de l'antiquité classique," Byzantion 25–27 (1955–1957): 383–412, is highly recommended. For discussion of ancient musical instruments, Curt Sachs's The History of Musical Instruments (New York, 1940) is still the standard reference work.

New Sources

Anderson, Warren. Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.

Belis, Annie. Les Musiciens dans l'Antiquité. Paris, 1999.

Brulé, Pierre, and Christophe Vendriès, eds. Chanter les dieux: musique et religion dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine. Rennes, Zool.

Comotti, Giovanni. Music in Greek and Roman Culture. Baltimore, Md., 1989.

Landels, John G. Music in Ancient Greece and Rome. New York, 1999.

McKinnon, James, ed. Antiquity and the Middle Ages: From Ancient Greece to the 15th Century. Music and Society Series, vol. 1. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1991.

Mathiesen, Thomas J. Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Lincoln, 1999.

Scott, William C. Musical Design in Sophoclean Theater. Hanover, N.H., 1996.

West, M. L. Ancient Greek Music. New York, 2001.

Eric Werner (1987)

Revised Bibliography