Greek Music and its Relation to Modern Times

Abstract

In Greece the art of music was honoured as scarcely inferior to poetry itself, and in lyric and tragic compositions at least the two arts were almost inseparably allied. The religious and athletic assemblies, the Panathenaia, the Olympia, the Pythia, the Karneia, etc., were not complete without a goodly number of musical celebrations, and from quite early times an important musical contest had been held at Delphi in which the greatest singers and instrumentalists took part. At Athens the free-born youth was trained in the essentials of the art, and music was considered so much a part of the national life that innovators were not infrequently charged with aiming at the subversion of the state itself. Greek literature is so full of allusions to, and metaphors drawn from music, that a question of real interest and importance often presents itself to us: how far are we in Europe, who have inherited so much in literature and the plastic arts from the Greeks, also indebted to them for our modern music? Is there, in short, any recognisable chain of descent from Terpander and Timotheos to Beethoven and Wagner? Strong negatives and affirmatives have been given to this question because of the doubt which exists about the real nature of Greek music itself. Some enquirers believe that ancient Greek music contained the germs of that ecclesiastical system from which modern music has been evolved; others arriving at different conclusions, deny that the music of the golden age of Greece bears any real relation to that of modern times.

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