… remember: we owe it all to Hammurabi and his ilk. Ironic, really, to think that the scoring of 'Rule Britannia' owes its existence to what is now a small, desolate place nearly 90 kilometres south of Baghdad, central Iraq.
SUMERIA 1, EGYPT 0
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ver in Egypt, things were not half as good. The Semitic Hyksos kings, having driven the Egyptians south and set up their own regime around the Nile Delta, appear to have been the exact antithesis of their more or less contemporaneous Babylonian next-door-but- one neighbours. When it comes to music, culture and the arts in general, their tenure of this precious region, roughly from around 1650 to 1550??, produced the following things: nihilum, ouSev and ,W~^AU~^II P Although there is no surviving relief depicting this encounter, the conversation has been handed down through the centuries. (»i, to expand, nothing, nothing and nothing, in Latin, Greek and cod l-nvptian. Yes, a bit of a don't-hold-your-breath period for Egyptian arts. No new instruments, no new music and the charts full of sad i over versions.
I KX me round up a little, then. 1500?? already, and we're doing pfttty well. We have a 'version' of music, as it were: very little harmony, though, and mosuy one-note stuff, with rather weird instru-numation. So, something that we in the UK today might not i ii i ignize too much, unless you happen to be a Phil Collins fan. The I liuites of northern Syria were doing very well, thank you very much, with a whole host of instruments, among them the guitar, trumpet, lambourine and lyre. Later still, around 1000?? onwards, there's also evidence of professional singers and musicians being connected with religious ceremonies in Israel, using many of the same instruments. But to get to the first actual recorded piece of music, you have to skip a full two hundred or so years, back to the Sumerians. They had got their five-note scale, too, some time after 800?? and left the first ever piece of music not long after. It was a hymn and, obviously, when I say recorded, I mean it was carved on what is known as a cuneiform tablet, a wedge-shaped piece of clay, which would be inscribed with a stylus when wet. Now, if I simply ignore the best part of a hundred years or so - and believe me, I am more than prepared to do that - then I can get on to the Greeks, in earnest. And who better to start with than Terpander of Lesbos? Er, that's a rhetorical question, by the way.
MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE I'M A LESBIAN…
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ell, who knows, it could have been the tide of a song. But before we get down to business, we need to see what sort of artistic world this Terpander chap was born into. You see, somewhere, somehow, between here and the old court musicians in Egypt, music had gone from being pretty much nothing to pretty much everything. Music, the Greeks now believed, was the bringer of all things good. It shaped morals. It educated. The 'aural' pleasure of music was but the tiny tip of the iceberg. Music was much more important than just the smile it raised. It was, also, not just about music. Music to the Greeks - mousike - meant three things: dancing and poetry, as well as music itself.
Terpander of Lesbos lived from 712 to 645??, and was probably born in Antissa on the north-western side of the island. He is credited with inventing the seven-stringed lyre and, whether he did or not, he certainly made a big enough noise with it at the 26th ancient Olympiad, held in Sparta, to become a bit of a national hero. If this wasn't enough to win him fame and fortune, he also allegedly started the first music schools in Sparta.
Around the same time, a more legendary character was also making a bit of a splash in the music world. Arion was a native of Samos, a famous musician working at the court of Periander, the king of Corinth. These days, he is largely remembered for two things: first, that he introduced the idea of 'strophes' and, thus, 'antistrophes' -that is, the alternating parts of a stanza. Secondly, though, and slightly more interestingly, he is also remembered for what happened to him at sea. On the way back from a music competition in Sicily, his boat was stormed by pirates, who robbed him and were about to throw him overboard when Arion asked that he be allowed to sing one last song. He took up his lyre and sang so beautifully that dolphins gathered around the boat. When he was finally made to walk the plank, he got a lift on the back of a dolphin and was ferried safely to the shore. I do love a happy ending.
The next major character in the incomplete and utter history of Greek music is the multi-talented Pythagoras. No, there weren't two people named Pythagoras - this is the very same person who lived from 580?? and came up with the theorem for right-angled triangles. If you think about it, though, music was at much the same point in its development as mathematics and science, so it's not surprising that a philosopher/mathematician would, at some point, focus his attentions on music. Pythagoras more or less came up with the scale we have today. Legend has it that he got some of his inspiration from watching and listening to a blacksmith at work hammering. Noticing ih.it the hammers all produced different sounds, he discovered that ihcy weighed 12, 9, 8 and 6 pounds each. It's said that, from this, he derived the intervals of an octave, a fifth, a fourth and a tone. If true, 11 wouldn't be the last time that making music and getting hammered had gone hand in hand.
Pythagoras died in around 475??.?? was overlapped, so to?•peak, by a guy called Pindar, a great Greek lyric poet, possibly the greatest. He was a 'Boeotian' - that is, both a resident of central? i recce and a particularly nasty turn of the letters from Carol in ('.ountdown. Pindar was a well-travelled nobleman and enough fragments of his work survive to make it clear that he more or less invented the ode. He was also a bit of a wiz on the aulos, the cithara, and the lyre. Clever clogs, no doubt, but a bit B-list when you compare him to the chap who came along just eleven years after he died - Mr Lato: Mr P. Lato.
PLATONIC SOLFA
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K, OK, I hear you read, just what is another philosopher doing in the Incomplete amp; Utter) Well, I'll tell you. Not only did Plato give us most of our info on Pythagoras, he also laid down a few 'philosophical' ideas about music, too, both in his Republic and Laws. Music consists of three aspects, he said: the word, the harmony and the rhythm. Instrumental music was out. Words were integral. He also had a few things to say about the nature of the different modes. The different modes were, more or less, the different scales that each piece was played in - not exactly scales, and not exactly keys, to be precise, but the groups of notes used to play any given piece. Plato believed he could define many of the characters of the modes, and, going one step further, could prescribe and recommend different modes for different things. The 'Mixolydian' mode, he said, was full of wailing and lamenting, while the 'Lydian' and even 'Ionian' modes were effeminate and relaxing - and therefore unsuitable for fighting men. Pieces composed in the 'Dorian' mode were heroic, while the 'Phrygian' character was persuasive. I wonder if anyone ever took his advice to heart and faced a marauding enemy of barbarians, armed only with a Lydian ode, hoping to relax them to death?
INSTRUMENTAL INSTITUTION
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ust as Plato was? pupfl of Socrates, so Aristotle was a pupil of Plato.
Born in Stagirus, Macedonia, in 384??, Aristotle studied with Mr P. at his Academy in Athens. Aristotle (wouldn't it be lovely if we could find evidence to suggest he was known as Ari to his friends?) was not a great musician, as such, but, like Plato before him, he applied his thinking to many areas of life, one of them being music. He, too, thought that music was MUCH more important than the simple aural pleasure that it gave. It had real ethical power, and it was vitally important in the process of education. He disagreed with Plato, though, on the subject of words. He was prepared to accept instrumental music, because, he thought, it spoke directly to the listener's emotions, unhindered by a poet's words. To him, music was almost homeopathic and certainly cathartic. If he were in charge today, you'd probably be able to get a prescription at the chemist's for string quartets, to be taken two or three times a day, with food.