PhD Thesis in Classical Archaeology, University of Heidelberg, 2006. 2 vol., xviii+454 pp., 333 figs. (forthcoming in German)
by Manolis Mikrakis
OVERVIEW
Not only in Archaic and Classical Greece but also in the prehistoric and early historic cultures of Crete, the Cycladic islands, and the Greek mainland, music played a vitally important (but often overlooked) role. Firmly embedded in divine cult, initiation rites, mortuary or ancestral ceremonies, healing practices, and feasting, musical performances shaped cultural identity, organized collective memory, and defined gender and social status to quite a surprising degree. Based on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources dating between 3000 and 670 BC, this thesis examines a whole range of collective activities involving the production or consumption of, and reflection on, sound from a broad cultural-historical and ethnomusicological perspective. Nine chapters in chronological order discuss stringed instruments as significant technological achievements, playing techniques, musical systems and song in the period extending from the Early Bronze Age down to the early Archaic period. The thesis also explores the mutual interaction with Near Eastern, Egyptian and Central Mediterranean musical cultures, the interplay of music with its continuously changing political, economic and social environment, and the use of musical performance in legitimizing power relations.
PREVIOUS SCHOLARSHIP
As is often the case with domains of pre-Archaic Aegean culture, research on its music began as a contribution to the controversy over the origins of ancient Greek music (e.g., Aign 1963), as criticism of Greek historicizing sources (e.g., Herbig 1929, Deubner 1929), most notably Homer (Wegner 1968), or within the publication of individual archaeological finds as spectacular artefacts. Only recently did the Aegean Bronze Age receive scholarly attention for its music in its own right(Younger 1998 – see, however, reviews by West 1999, Bélis 2001 and van Schaik 2001/2), while the diverse visual evidence for music-making in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Cyprus has not been the subject of systematic consideration so far. Furthermore, classical scholarship has recently become interested in cultural and social aspects of music-making in Greece (see, for instance, Murray and Wilson 2004, Bundrick 2005), but the focus is still on the Classical period.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK - METHODOLOGY
As an attempt to examine music in specific chronological and cultural contexts, and to understand how musical activities supported different social, cultural and ideological agendas in them, the present study is at variance with traditional universalistic or naturalistic approaches to musical behaviour. Old and new evidence(vase and mural paintings, seal engravings and clay seal impressions, figurines, metalwork, and pictographic signs) are reconnected to their archaeological contexts through extensive data analysis. Stratigraphic, art-historical and comparative methods are employed to determine dates and cultural affiliations. New interpretations of visual sources are based on iconographic scrutiny, the purpose being to understand how they communicated musical knowledge. Far from being treated either as blindly reliable, representational documents or as “works of art” that can be lightly dismissed, images of music, just as written references in Mycenaean or Near Eastern archival texts and in early Greek poetry, are viewed as valuable evidence for music-related conceptualizations and belief systems. Traditional research has been classifying musical instruments through idealistic downward divisions from context-free, abstract classes that lack meaning in terms of the culturally and historically significant variation (Kartomi 1990: 167–174, 201). Musical instruments, however, are often too complex to serve as primary units of classification, and cross-cultural or intergenerational transfer of musical culture owes little, if anything, to their circulation as manufactured goods. The analysis in this study focuses on individual structural traits of stringed instruments corresponding to specific areas of musical knowledge (e.g., stringing as related to musical systems, figural decoration as related to religious symbolism or mythology). These traits are explored across different instrumental types and cultural contexts. Then, a new classification system based on increasingly more abstract, upward groupings of individual specimens is applied (compare Kartomi 1990: 198–209).
OUTCOMES
In summarizing the outcomes of this research, four major topics are referred to: (a) song genres, (b) social interaction and (c) institutional control through music, and (d) musical change in relation to cross-cultural interaction.
(a) Song Genres
Several images and sparse textual evidence from Crete, mainland Greece and Egypt, suggest invocations, incantations, hymns and the like as the most common song genres in the Minoan and Mycenaean elite cultures. Epiphanic and presentation rituals as well as healing ceremonies might have been the most common settings. This study questions the commonly held notion of bards performing early forms of oral epic in the Mycenaean palaces. The emergence of this particular secular tradition that culminated in the composition of the eighth-century Homeric epics is viewed as belonging to a cluster of profound musical changes that occurred in the turbulent postpalatial period following the destruction of the Mycenaean centres around 1200 BC. Another significant innovation apparently related to the new, melodically less rich style of epic recitation, is the introduction of the lyre with a limited number of strings.
(b) Music and social interaction
The cultures under consideration exploited the social forces of music intensively, in a variety of ways. In the second millennium palace states, lyre playing seems to have been the exclusive task of male priestly specialists. Such cult officials based their status on the perceived ability to communicate with supernatural forces through the medium of music. By the eleventh century, however, a process of secularization and opening-up of music to non-specialists appears to be well under way. Beginning in eleventh century Cyprus and continuing in Crete in the tenth and on mainland Greece in the eighth century, representations illustrate involvement with weaponry and music as joint components of a male elite lifestyle. Acquiring elite status through musical and martial skills was nothing short of a “social revolution” according to D. Page, who pointed to Archilochos, the seventh-century poet, musician and soldier, as the first known figure of such status in Greek history. The present study argues that this “revolution” took place several centuries earlier than previously thought, in the twelfth century BC, and is associated with the collapse of the Mycenaean palace system. Further Early Iron Age Cypriot and Attic images depict musical instruments being played at ceremonial feasts by the participants themselves rather than by serving entertainers. By the end of the period studied for this thesis, the exclusive domain of cult musicians had long turned into an effective medium for the display of personal achievement and the management of collective memory. This development clearly anticipates the quintessential prominence of music in Classical democratic education and performance culture, especially in Athens.
(c) Music and elite institutional control
Significant musical changes in the Aegean ensue in periods of profound transformation in socio-political structures, and this implies that music and political organization must have been deeply interwoven. The interplay between the two domains is particularly well documented at the Mycenaean palace of Pylos, where a lyre-player appears on the wall behind the throne indicating that music was instrumental in amplifying the authority of the ruler (wanax) as an intermediary to the gods. Recent in-depth studies on feasting in Mycenaean society are critically evaluated with the aim to understand how music operated in the context of state-sponsored religious banquets. Music in the early Greek symposion, or aristocratic drinking-party for male participants, is a further topic extensively discussed in this thesis.
(d) Musical change and cross-cultural interaction
Music-making in the Aegean was neither a peripheral manifestation of Oriental musical culture, nor an autonomous and self-regulating domain of life that developed in isolation from all Mediterranean exchange networks. The present study brings to light a rich repertoire of phenomena beyond these contrasting views championed in earlier scholarship by one-way diffusionism and ethnocentric regionalism respectively. There is indeed evidence for the highly selective adoption of fully developed musical instruments from abroad as well as for the occasional integration of individual elements belonging to the areas of instrumental technology, playing technique or music-related beliefs and iconography. Most changes, however, are not paralleled in neighbouring cultures and can be better explained as culture specific responses to changes in the ritual, social, and political settings of music-making. Musical systems too, to the degree that they can be inferred from the instruments, developed independently in the Aegean. Further evidence (e.g., the use of Minoan healing incantations in Egypt or the influence exerted by Mycenaean lyres on Southern Asia Minor) suggest that it was a true mutual exchange, not just a one-way dissemination that was taking place between the Mediterranean cultures. The reorientation of Cypriot musical culture towards the Aegean at the turn of the eleventh century BC is an example of profound musical change owing much to external (in this case Mycenaean) influence.
REFERENCES CITED
Aign, B. 1963. Die Geschichte der Musikinstrumente des ägäischen Raumes bis um 700 vor Christus, Diss. Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main.
Bélis, A. 2001. Review of Younger 1998, Revue archéologique, 112.
Bundrick, S. D. 2005. Music and Image in Classical Athens, Cambridge.
Deubner. L. 1929. “Die viersaitige Leier”, Athenische Mitteilungen 54, 194–200.
Herbig, R. 1929. “Griechischen Harfen”, Athenische Mitteilungen 54, 164–193.
Kartomi, M. J. 1990. On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, Chicago and London.
Murray, P., and P. Wilson (eds.). 2004. Music and the Muses. The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, Oxford.
van Schaik, M. 2001/2. Review of Younger 1998, Imago Musicae 18/19, 249–251.
Wegner, M. 1968. Musik und Tanz, Archaeologia Homerica III U, Göttingen.
West, M. L. 1999. Review of Younger 1998, Bibliotheca orientalis 56, 750–753.
Younger, J. G. 1998. Music in the Aegean Bronze Age, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, Pocket-Book 144, Jonsered.
