¿Quién pagaba la música cuando nadie compraba entradas?

We ask ourselves

• If nobody recorded any of it, how can anyone say what it sounded like?
• Did anyone play just for pleasure, or was somebody always paying?
• What job did music do that nothing else could do?
• When you write a melody down, what gets written and what is left out?
• If two groups sing the same score and sound different, which one is wrong?
• Why does a bone instrument survive and a song does not?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Four Greek lines do have music written above them. They are carved on a marble column about two thousand years old. We are going to sing them.

The text, with rough pronunciation and the meaning:

• Ὅσον ζῇς, φαίνου — hoson zes, phainou — While you live, shine
• μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ — meden holos su lupou — grieve over nothing
• πρὸς ὀλίγον ἐστὶ τὸ ζῆν — pros oligon esti to zen — life lasts a short while
• τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ — to telos ho chronos apaitei — time claims its end

Score: modern transcription engraved for this unit; public-domain melody

First the rhythm of line one, clapped: one short clap, one worth two, one worth three. Then the pitches. On the syllables ho-son zes the melody goes A – E – E, jumping up a fifth straight away. On phai-nou it runs C♯ – D – E and lands on D.

Once that line works, sing all four in a row. The four lines last exactly the same. The whole melody fits inside one octave, E to E, and the last note of the piece is the low E, which never appears anywhere else.

Two honest warnings. The version we sing is written a fourth above what the Greek signs indicate, so an ordinary voice can reach it. And the speed does not come from the stone: it comes from whoever is singing.

What changed

Start with the money, which is the most useful question. In Athens the festival choruses were not paid for by the audience. They were paid for by a rich citizen whose turn it was. He was the choregos, and covering rehearsals, costumes and a room was a public duty, like a tax. If his chorus won, he got a bronze tripod and dedicated it to a god.

Outside the theatre, music was almost always working. At a sacrifice the aulos played while the animal was led to the altar. On a trireme an auletes gave the rowers the stroke, and he was crew, like the helmsman. At a banquet you hired whoever played and danced. At a burial you sang, which is exactly what we have just been doing.

Thucydides wrote the army case down when he described the battle of Mantinea in 418 BC. The Spartans advanced slowly to the music of many pipers, and he says what it was for: nothing to do with religion, but so that they would move evenly, in step, without breaking ranks. That is the clearest definition of function you will read, and an eyewitness wrote it.

Foto: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Then, at some point, somebody decided to write it down. That is what changed. The Greeks put letters above the syllables of the text, plus a dash or two to say how long each one lasted. That is enough to sing something again a thousand years later, which is why the Seikilos epitaph still exists.

Now look at what that system records and what it does not. A sound has four parameters: pitch, duration, intensity and timbre. Greek notation writes the first two and says nothing about the other two. Not how loud, not what with.

Test it by ear. Whistle the first four notes, then sing them: same pitch, same duration, a completely different timbre. The hook of I Ain't Worried is whistled; played on a guitar it would be the same notes and a different song.

That is the parameter no recording of the epitaph can take from the stone, because the stone does not carry it. Whoever records it chooses whether a woman sings it, whether a lyre doubles the line, whether it comes out loud or soft. Half of what you hear was decided ten years ago.

Objects behave the same way, and it is worth saying plainly. From a buried aulos you can measure the finger holes and work out approximate pitches. But what made the aulos sound was a double reed of cane, and cane is organic material that does not reach us: anyone rebuilding the instrument has to make one again by trial and error. The part that most defines a timbre is exactly the part that is missing.

There is a third route, which is looking. Greek pottery shows aulos players blowing; Roman mosaics show musicians holding a lyre. An image tells you how many were playing, how they held the instrument and what was going on around them. It tells you nothing about a single note.

Three hard facts, to keep at hand:

• Seikilos epitaph — marble from Tralles in present-day Turkey, first or second century AD. Found around 1883 during railway works; now in the National Museum of Denmark.
• Delphic hymns — two, carved on the wall of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi and found in 1893. The second, signed by Limenios, was performed in 128 BC.
• Hydraulis, the water organ — invented in Greece in the third century BC. The best-preserved example was found in Hungary in 1931 and carries an inscription dated 228 AD.

The same device elsewhere

The epitaph is a single vocal line, with no chords underneath, over a text that gives the orders. That is called monody, and it did not end with Rome. These three do the same job, and they are worth hearing back to back:

• We Will Rock You — for most of the song there is not one chord: voices, feet and hands. What holds it up is not the notes but the timbre and the force, which is precisely what nobody writes down.
• Gregorian chant — one line, in Latin, no harmony, no dynamics marked and no tempo written. A thousand years after the epitaph, the same unsolved problem.
• Vedic chanting from India — a repertoire carried by memory for around three thousand years without a single note written. UNESCO recognised it in 2008 as intangible heritage.

All three answer the same question differently. The Vedic case is the most interesting for us: if nobody writes anything, the only way to keep a music alive is for someone to repeat it exactly, for a lifetime, in front of someone else.

And here at home?

From Roman Zaragoza a whole building has survived. The theatre of Caesaraugusta was built in the first half of the first century, held about six thousand spectators and stood until the third century, when its stone started being carted off to build walls. It stayed lost under the city until a survey brought it back to light in 1972. You can visit it.

A floor has survived too. In the so-called House of Orpheus, a grand home from the end of the second century or the beginning of the third, the dining room measured seventy square metres and was paved with a mosaic nine metres by six: Orpheus playing, and the animals stopped to listen. It is in the Museo de Zaragoza. Whoever ate there ate on top of a musician.

Foto: Ecelan, CC BY-SA 3.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

And a poet has survived. Martial was born in Bilbilis Augusta, next to today's Calatayud, between AD 38 and 41, and left for Rome in his twenties. His epigrams describe the dancers from southern Hispania who performed at Roman banquets, and he names what they carried: crusmata baetica, metal castanets. A good part of what is known about those musicians comes from a man born near Calatayud.

Here is the unit's problem reproduced in miniature. Of the music of Caesaraugusta we have a building, a pavement and some verses. We have the seating capacity, the size of the room and the name of the instrument. We do not have the sound.

Classroom activities

• While the epitaph plays: half the class sings it at full volume and the other half almost whispers it, at the same time. Same pitch, same duration, different intensity. Then decide which half is wrong. The answer is that the stone does not say.
• While the Delphic hymn on the aulos plays: count how many separate sounds you can pick out at once. The aulos has two pipes and one person blowing.
• While We Will Rock You plays: raise your hand the moment the first chord arrives. Until then you are hearing monody, just like at Delphi.
• Play: we build We Will Rock You with the band. The chart and the tab are attached to its own article.
• Create: write any four syllables and put only pitch and duration above them, nothing else. Hand it to another group and have them sing it, choosing timbre and intensity. Compare the two versions of the same score.

Key vocabulary

• Parameters of sound — parámetros del sonido: altura, duración, intensidad y timbre
• Timbre — timbre (what tells you a note is a whistle and not a voice)
• Notation — notación (the system for writing music down)
• Monody — monodia: una sola línea melódica, sin acordes debajo
• Aulos — aulós: instrumento griego de dos tubos con caña doble

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: We Will Rock You, I Ain't Worried.

The Seikilos epitaph sung — the four lines we work on in class.

How the stone is read — Armand D'Angour of Oxford University shows the letters written above the text, explains how they are deciphered, and ends with a choir singing the Delphic hymn with the aulos.

The epitaph decoded sign by sign — first the story of the stone, then the melody, then the rhythm: where every note and every duration of what we sing in class comes from.

A Delphic hymn on the real instrument — Barnaby Brown plays the paean of Athenaios on a reconstruction of the Louvre aulos.

The aulos at full stretch — Callum Armstrong plays both pipes at once and breathes without stopping. Notice how many sounds come out of one person.

Aristoxenus's three rhythms — Lina Palera, lyre in hand, explains how the Greeks understood rhythm: sounds arriving at regular intervals are not enough, some have to weigh more than others. They called the strong beat thesis and the weak one arsis. From there come their three basic rhythms: dactylic, in two beats; iambic, in three; and paeonic, in five. They are the same 2/4, 3/4 and 5/4 we write today.

The missing piece — how the aulos's double reed of cane is made today, the one part of the instrument no excavation ever delivers.

The kithara — Peter Pringle shows a reconstruction of the kithara of classical Greece: how it is built, how it is held and how it sounds with silk strings.

Tuning without a tuner — how a lyre was tuned in antiquity, string by string and by ear, following what the Greek treatises describe.

Three ways to share out the notes — the Greeks tuned the same group of four strings in three different ways, and one of them uses notes a piano does not have. You hear all three.

The water organ — the hydraulis rebuilt, within the European Music Archaeology Project.

The water organ from the inside — an animation of how it worked: the pumps, the water tank that keeps the pressure steady and the valve under each pipe.

The musician on the mosaic — the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in under five minutes, animated by TED-Ed. Orpheus is the one playing on the floor of the House of Orpheus.

One line, a thousand years later — Gregorian chant by the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos.

Keeping music without writing it — the tradition of Vedic chanting, on the UNESCO channel.

The theatre under Zaragoza — the Ruta de Caesaraugusta museums, on the fiftieth anniversary of the find.

Monody in pop — We Will Rock You, Queen (1977).

• The stone — Seikilos epitaph and Delphic Hymns on Wikipedia.
• The ancient source on the army — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, book 5, paragraph 70.
• Round the corner — Museo del Teatro de Caesaraugusta and Museo de Zaragoza, where the Orpheus mosaic is.
• Vedic chanting — the UNESCO entry.