Music Education

Methods of Training.

Formal music education is known in Athens from the beginning of the fifth century b.c.e. Before this, people interested in learning to sing or play an instrument could study informally under someone else, or even teach themselves. A professional bard would train a talented pupil in return for lodging, food, and clothes. Repertoire and technique were passed down orally and by rote; it is unlikely that there was any tradition of teaching pupils how to read music. The large choral groups, which performed at public festivals, did require organized training by a chorus-leader (khoregos), who may also have taught participants to read the poetry. From the seventh to sixth centuries b.c.e., there were active music centers at Sparta, where Alcman composed his partheneia (girls' choral dances), and on the island of Lesbos, where Sappho set up choruses for girls. In Sparta, part of a young boy's military training included learning how to dance and sing paeans while wearing armor.

Schools.

Instruction in music and letters generally took place in the teacher's home, but professional music schools were established in the late eighth to seventh centuries b.c.e. by Terpander and Thaletas at Sparta. After the fourth century b.c.e., professional training was offered by a Guild or Academy school, where students from all over the Greek world would study choral and instrumental composition. Girls and boys both received an education, and some girls became professional musicians. Many vase-paintings from Athens depict a typical day in school, which included music, letters, mathematics, and physical education. A famous cup, painted by Douris in the early fifth century, illustrates this in particularly fine detail: a kitharistes("lyre-teacher") is facing his student; both hold the chelys (tortoise-shell lyre). Other lyres hang on the wall above their heads. To their right, a seated grammatistes ("grammar-teacher") holds a scroll with verse written on it, which his pupil recites while standing stiffly at attention. A bearded paidagogos, a slave in charge of the boys, watches the lessons. On the other side of the cup, one student prepares to sing while his teacher plays the aulos (double-reed pipe); nearby, another teacher writes on a wax tablet for his pupil.

The Effect of Music.

Greek philosophers, theorists, and even the poets themselves generally agreed that music had a profound effect on a person's character, and for that reason the types of music taught in school should be carefully chosen. As a rule, simple traditional styles were preferred by educators—complex, foreign (not Greek), styles were not. The lyre, associated with Apollo and Orpheus, was favored over the pipe, which accompanied wild ecstatic worship of Dionysus. Homeric poetry or selections of tragic choral odes were preferable to other genres of songs. Pythagoras, a mathematician of the late sixth–early fifth centuries b.c.e., believed that sounds and rhythms, which are ordered by numbers, exemplified and corresponded to the harmony of the cosmos. This is further explained through the Greek word for music theory, harmonics, which contains the Indo-European root -ar, meaning "to join, fit together, be in synchrony." According to Pythagoras, the consonances of a fourth, fifth, and octave were models of harmony. His inquiries into the science of sound and relative numbers began what would later be known as "acoustic theory."

Ethos.

The music teacher Damon, building on the ideas of Pythagoras a generation later, taught that each musical genre had its own character, or ethos, which affects human thought and behavior. For boys, rhythms and melodic forms should be chosen for their masculine qualities; girls should learn music that taught modesty and restraint. The chromatic genera of scales were considered effeminate, while the enharmonic promoted courage and manliness. Damon's focus on the ethical qualities of music in turn influenced those who followed, including Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman writer Varo. All of these writers exhibit a conservative desire to label, categorize, select, and even censor certain types of melodic forms. In the Laws and Republic, Plato considered only two harmoniai (modal scales) acceptable for the purposes of education: the Dorian and Phrygian. Aristotle was a bit more lenient, admitting that all types of music have their place, even the baser sorts. Not all philosophers adhered to the doctrine of ethos; the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers of the third–second centuries b.c.e., for example, attacked the notion that music had any permanent effect on the soul. Philodemus, an Epicurean, wrote a treatise entitled On Music in which he argued that poetry had power, but music itself was simply pleasurable. Despite those who would contradict the Pythagorean notion that music was linked to cosmic harmony and therefore had the ability to influence the soul, the idea would not go away. After the first century c.e. the doctrine of ethos was adopted and adapted by Ptolemy and Aristides Quintilianus (third–fourth century c.e.), who supported earlier arguments that traditional, rational, masculine melodic forms must be used for education, but others could be used for different purposes.

Guilds.

Professional guilds of artists and musicians, known as the Dionysou Technitai (Artisans of Dionysus), were created in Athens and in Teos (north-west Asia Minor, now Turkey) by the beginning of the third century b.c.e. In his Deipnosophistae, the lexicographer Athenaeus included solo instrumentalists such as kitharists and auletes, as well as poets, actors, singers, and composers as members of guilds operating under a group of officers headed by a priest of Dionysus. They provided performers, directors, and composers for any occasion, and handled payment contracts. In this way, the Dionysou Technitai was comparable to a musician's union. Such guilds also functioned as schools offering training in singing, musical instrument instruction, and lessons in the writing of rhythm and melody. The guild schools may have kept a library of written compositions, but none have survived.

sources

Giovanni Comotti, Music in Greek and Roman Culture. Trans. Rosaria V. Munson (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, originally published in Italian, 1979).

John G. Landels, Music in Ancient Greece and Rome (London: Routlege, 1999).

Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Martin West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).