Survival

By a very lucky chance, one of the handful of transcriptions of ancient music that we possess is from a choral song in Euripides’ Orestes, and, even though it is only some seven lines long (338-44), it demonstrates a couple of the characteristics of the new musical style, and so nicely corroborates our other evidence for them. For instance, in the last phrase, the monosyllabic word en (‘‘in’’) is given two different notes, rather than one, as would be musically traditional. It is even written e-en in the papyrus to make this rhythmic point entirely clear. This raises the intriguing question of whether these fragments of musical scoring are the very music Euripides himself composed for the work; and more generally, it makes us wonder how long and under what conditions the music of tragedy survived. In other words, the questions of transmission investigated for so many centuries in connection with the literary texts of tragedy need also to be asked of their music.

There can be no doubt that the music of Aeschylus survived at least until the end of the classical period, and very probably much longer. In Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs (405), a significant segment of the contest in the underworld between Aeschylus and Euripides assumes not only that the audience will be able to follow what is to us a fairly technical discussion of ta mele, the ‘‘musical parts’’ (see, for example, Frogs 1248, 1255, 1261-62), but that it will also recognize (at least a rough caricature of) Aeschylean musical style. Elsewhere in comedy the older generation of around 420 is imagined as still liking to sing snatches of Aeschylus or even of his somewhat older contemporary, Phrynichus (active around 500 bce). It is most likely that the music of this early generation of tragedians was transmitted primarily or entirely by oral means. At any given time, there would have been a pool of chorus members who over the years had gone through rigorous training under the guiding eye of the poets themselves. Since a musical formation was basic to any Greek upbringing - to varying degrees of complexity according to class and local culture - it seems likely that the music of tragedy was preserved mnemonically in living form, according to a kind of pyramidal structure. The poet, actors, and chorus members who had learned it for months (not to forget the aulos-player) represented the tip of the memory pyramid, and were able to transmit their knowledge for further performances; less engaged audience members at the base of the pyramid perhaps picked up the simple melodic structure of choral songs that had struck them with special force. So much is clear from the famous story told about the Athenian soldiers taken captive in Sicily around 413 who supposedly saved their own lives by singing songs of Euripides to their captors (Plutarch, Nicias 29). We should remember that at the City Dionysia in Athens alone there were some 1,165 citizens involved in the tragic, comic, and dithyrambic choruses each year. Over the decades this would represent a very significant pool of choral competence and musical memory.

The Orestes musical papyrus is dated to around 280 at the very earliest. What of the century or more that separates it from the death of the poet? Here we must also stress the role of reperformance. Although we are quite rightly encouraged to conceive of the Athenian festival theater as nothing like a modern repertory theater, free to (re)produce plays at more or less any time or place, we are starting to see more clearly just how much reperformance there in fact was in and outside Athens, and from how early a date. We can be fairly sure, for instance, that after Aeschylus died in 456 ‘‘anyone who wished to’’ could ‘‘ask the archon for a chorus’’ to produce his work (Life of Aeschylus 12; cf. Aristophanes, Frogs 868, Acharnians 9-12). This seems to reflect a political decision of the Athenian people as a whole, and demonstrates the cultural and political importance of Aeschylus to the city. And so it is unimaginable that any chorus granted by the archon in this way would have performed tunes and dance-steps other than those of the master himself. Over a century later, around 330 (and thus much closer to the date of our musical fragment of Orestes), the Athenian statesman Lycurgus legislated to have the texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides transcribed and deposited in the state archive and required that actors follow them without deviation. It is hard to imagine that so evident a desire to preserve the works of the three canonical tragic poets would not have extended to such an important component as their music, and so it may well be that knowledge of the music of the great tragedians was transmitted to Alexandria along with their texts. The Alexandrian edition, then - the ultimate source of our manuscript tradition - may have had notation, and it may also have set out the melic parts in such a way as to reflect the musical phraseology of the original. If so - and even though their notation is lost - it may in fact be possible, as some scholars believe (see Fleming 1999), to deduce something more of the rhythmic patterning of their music from the way the later copyists reproduced the phraseology of the Alexandrian edition.

The complexity of tragedy’s music demands an approach on many levels, using as wide a range of methodologies as we have available to us: an approach that incorporates the strictly musical and metrical technicalities, insofar as we can reconstruct and understand them, along with the cultural, historical, and ethical associations they bring, and that takes stock of the sociology of theater music, the status and perception of its players and their instruments. Finally, our approach should fully integrate an understanding of tragedy’s Dionysian restaging of musical culture, and its own supple discourse on music - its penetrating, prismatic reflection on its own broad medium, its functions, its emotions, its power; the somewhat uncanny sense of‘‘anti-music’’ it creates with its constant talk (and song) of the ‘‘lyreless muse,’’ with the threnodic exploration of musical loss. And in all of this we must also keep a sharp eye on the diachronic, historical dimension, for musical developments were for the Greeks among the clearest markers of profound cultural and social change.