Our understanding of the music of Greek tragedy is further complicated by the fact that in the last thirty or so years of the fifth century - the period of Euripides’ greatest productivity and notoriety, as well as of social and intellectual turmoil in his city - Athens was the center for what has been dubbed a musical revolution. So radical was the perceived impact of the constant and varied experimentation and change that some conservative critics like Plato saw something approaching the End of Civilization as he knew it, the overturning of all moral and social hierarchies. History is dotted with such outraged response to musical change, and when we probe more closely into the precise nature of the innovations introduced by these so-called New Musicians (a modern term), we find that, to modern eyes (and ears), they appear rather tame - the extension of one syllable of song over more than one note, for instance; or the abandonment of the repeated metrical patterns in tragic choral stanzas (known as ‘‘strophic responsion’’) in favor of a freer, less regular metrical pattern.
These developments arose in the neighboring performance categories of the dithyramb (dithyrambic contests, in two categories, men and boys, were a major choral event at the City Dionysia that took place alongside tragedy and comedy) and the kitharoidic nomos, a solo concert performance in which kithara-players sang long arias to their own accompaniment. But they soon spread to tragedy, a genre always avid for innovation, and the later works of Euripides (especially Trojan Women, performed in 415, and subsequent tragedies) show clear signs of their influence. Euripides was in fact said to have befriended, even collaborated with, the most radical of all these musical innovators, the fiery Timotheus of Miletus, composer of a kitharoidic nomos called The Persians, of which a lengthy fragment survives.
The style and structure, as well as the content, of tragic music were very significantly affected by the musical revolution; so too was the economic and social basis of the theater itself (see the excellent study of Csapo 2004). It is in this period that individual actors’ monodies start to grow as the collective form of song, the chorus, shrinks. New music demanded new levels of virtuosity that a group of amateur citizens could not easily reproduce. We should thus also mark this age as seeing the birth of the diva, for the most famous tragic actor-singers now became international stars, commanding huge fees and audiences around the Greek world. It is in this context too that the potential of the aulos for all manner of mimetic effects came into its own. The aulos-player himself, for so long inconspicuous in the record, achieved star status in this period; and the line between instrumental musician and actor blurred a little, as aulos-players added facial and bodily forms of mimesis to the acoustic. If the commemorative vase made in Athens and named (by modern scholars) after him is anything to go by, the most famous aulos-player of the ancient world, Pronomos of Thebes, stole the show when he played for the tragic poet Demetrius and his team late in the fifth century (for the vase see Csapo and Slater 1995, plate 8).
World History
