Music in Ancient Greece and Rome & Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.(Review)

Music in Ancient Greece and Rome. By John G. Landels. London: Routledge, 1999. [xii, 296 p. ISBN 0-415-16776-0. $85.]

Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. By Thomas J. Mathiesen. (Publications of the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, 2.) Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. [xv, 806 p. ISBN 0-8032-3079-6. $75.]

Over the last two decades, the generation of classics scholars that has come into its own since the 1950s has made a number of important contributions to the understanding of music in classical antiquity (above all, in the English language, Andrew Barker's two volumes of annotated translations of primary sources, Greek Musical Writings [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-89], Martin L. West's Ancient Greek Music [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], and Warren Anderson's Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994]). The two volumes under consideration here also add to that knowledge, though in a more narrowly specialized way, I think, than either author intended. One may be forgiven for wondering how it is that books on so remote and seemingly elusive a topic can continue to be written, especially since discoveries of fresh material have been almost entirely wanting in recent years. But the classical cultures hold us in unrelenting thrall, not least in their music al preoccupations, the reality of which seems to lie, tantalizingly, just beyond our grasp. Thus the ancient writings on music (whether theoretical, aesthetic, ethical, or historical), the extensive and vivid iconography, and the meager organology and fragments of written music are examined again and again, and new insights continue to emerge.

British scholar John G. Landels has aimed his book "at the student of Classical civilization, the student of the history of music, and at the general reader with an interest in either or both" (p. ix), and, engagingly written as it is, it would serve as a good introduction but for a major debility: Landels's presentation does not allow, for the most part, a sense of the sound and feel of the musical variety of Greek verse to reach the reader (and certainly not in his dreadful "Greeklish" transliterations of the poetry). The music that does emerge in the chapter "Music, Words and Rhythm" is particularly distorted; for some reason, Landels has brought in, to the confusion of the reader, long since discredited theories of performance, such as the "ictus," a brutally regular rhythmic trip-hammer, anti the gratuitous over lengthening of certain syllables and addition of rests once thought necessary to make the naturally supple Greek rhythms fit into the regular beat of Anglo-Saxon verse. Where an ancillary rest i s actually necessary, however, as it often is at the end of a line of epic verse where the composer has used a short syllable ([MUSICAL NOTES NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) but the meter requires the time of a long ([MUSICAL NOTES NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; with a final short syllable, [MUSICAL NOTES NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Landels is silent. Misleading also is his explanation of the important technical term catalexis as a "fade-out, or tail-away" (p. 116 and elsewhere), whereas it is in fact an abrupt truncation of a verse line by the loss of its final syllable. A homely example may be helpful here: "There once was a man from Kentucky" is an acatalectic line, that is, without catalexis; with catalexis, we would have the similar line, "There once was a man from Vermont." As one can readily hear, it is the line without catalexis that has the "fadeout."

Landels's two valuable contributions are his treatment of the aulos, the twin double-reed pipes that the Greeks enjoyed in almost any situation from concert solos to the dramatic stage to drunken dinner parties, and his chapters on music during the Hellenistic period and on music in Rome, the latter a sorely neglected subject. Landels has specialized in investigating the aulos, and his presentation, which is clear and easily grasped, shows convincingly that the twin pipes, played by the same musician, were normally sounded in unison, using "a beating or tremulant effect" that "could be controlled by a skilful player, and [that] no doubt contributed to the mood or ethos of the music" (p. 43). He also uses the putative fingering technique of this unlikely instrument as an aid in an unusually lucid explanation of the complex music notation of ancient Greece.

Simplified line drawings extracted from original vase paintings (most of the sources of which are given) serve well as illustrations. The music examples, however, are rather crudely executed and are not free of errors. There are some minor lapses in the text: a pipe with a length of "about 3 feet" (p. 80) gives the pitch F, not B[MUSICAL NOTES NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (correct on p. 178); an erroneous statement (p. 209) about the conventional numbering of the ancient notational symbols is unnecessarily confusing; and the conversion factor for changing an interval ratio into cents (p. 265-66) should be 3,986.

American musicologist Thomas J. Mathiesen's contribution is a large and rather daunting volume, elegant in layout and virtually flawless in its production, that he has "aimed principally at the musicologically oriented reader" (p. 15) who is "interested in the musical typologies, the musical instruments, and especially the historical development of music theory and its transmission through the Middle Ages" (p. xii). The instruments and their playing techniques are given a substantial chapter, although, as in the Landels book, attention to the most important of all instruments for the Greeks, the human voice ("ancient Greek music was fundamentally vocal" [Mathiesen, 159]), is desultory. Most of the various genres of composition receive adequate attention, but the signal contribution of this book is a history of the development of Greek music theory and its principal documents, with summaries of the contents of each, from Aristoxenus (late fourth century B.C.E.), a pupil of Aristotle, to the great Alexandrian scientist Claudius Ptolemy (second century C.E.), and, in a final chapter on the Middle Ages, to the Byzantine theorists Psellus, Pachymeres, and Bryennius (eleventh to thirteenth centuries). Mathiesen takes particular care to make the important connection from the ancient theorists to early medieval music theory in the West, especially Augustine and Boethius.