Emotion and Morals in Greek Music

8/10/2019 Emotion and Morals in Greek Music

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Emotion and Morals in Greek MusicAuthor(s): Katharine E. EggarSource: Music & Letters, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Apr., 1930), pp. 124-127Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/726341 .

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EMOTION ANDMORALS IN GREEK MUSIC

GREEK nmUSic iS Olle of the thinigs bout which nglish peoplenursea secret passion.

They would not admiiit t, of course, but English musicians have

always had about the someday-to-be-discovered onders of the musicof Hellas a romantic feeling which is suffering deep disappoint-ment over the repeated failure of learned research to bring to lightanything which fulfils heir expectations. They have always beenlioping that something in music equivalent to the Hermes ofPraxiteles n statues would come to light and make us all feel happywith hat -told-you-so eeling; nd it really s painful o admit, s Pro-fessor Dent puts it, that music is the one branch of Greek artwhich makes no enmotional ppeal to us at the present day. Wereally cannot bear to thilnk hat with all the other things n whichwe feel our response to the Greek spirit, music should be the onefornm f Greek art which brings us no message.

A survey by R. P. Winnington ngram(l) of recent research doesnot do much to revive these fond hopes. It is stones rather thanbread that we find placed upon the table, and the writer oncludeshis article by saying that although further fragments re likelyto turn up, there s little hope that they will be in better preserva-

tion than those we possess, or that they will date back to that earlyperiod about wlhich we are naturally most curious ; but he sumisupthe position s follows

The scholarmnay easonably xpect by careful tudy to eliminateapparent contradictions nd form hvpotheses which will give anintelligible istory f Greek musical theory; but the only desire ofthe musician s to understand Greek music as an art-to find n ita languagefor he expression f human emotion.

The scholar may reasonably hope to be satisfied. The musician,with his desire, with his human longing for a living contact, fearsthat he is to be turned way.

There speaks the disappointment which has had to confess thatGreek music as at present revealed is the only form of Greek artwhich leaves us cold-which seems to us to voice no emotion.

(1) In MUSIC AND LETmIS, October, 1929.

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EMOTIONAND MORALSIN GREEK MUSIC 125

as it certainly arouses none; yet we want-we still passionately,though perhaps secretly, want-to discover t as a language of

human motion.A very natural desire; but are we right o supposethat musicto the Greeks f the early periodwas a language or heir motions?What f we are on a false track n expecting hem o have regardedit as a vehicle or motional xpression?

I venture o think hat in taking for granted hat the Greekstried to express their own emotions-to express themselves-inmusic, we are reading ur own present-day ttitude f mind ntotheirs without ustification. t is, as I have said, natural hat weshould supposethe Greeks to have used music as a medium ofself-expression, ecausemusic with us has come more and moreto be regarded n that light, nd musicians f recent generationshave been forced o seek n this spectof music he ustification ortheir wn preoccupation ith t. But to attribute uch a conceptionof music to the Greek mind s to misunderstand uman evolution.The Greekswerenot hag-ridden s we moderns re with he desirefor self-expression. hat was not their dea of art of any kind.

They were not conscious f self n the way that human beings ofto-day re. But this s not o say that hey were acking n emotion.Far from t. Only we must not fall nto the mistake f referring othe emotions nd the self as if they were one and the same thing.The self s what feels; the emotions re that which s felt. The selffeels emotions nd thinks houghts, nd is at first wepthither ndthither y emotions nd kept n bondage y thought, ut by degreesbecomiiesapableof controlling he one and finding reedom n theother.

Nowthe early Greeksknew great deal about emotion, ut verylittle bout self. They were the prey of emotion nd the prisonersof thought; nid he lesson which heir race had to learn was self-conitrol. They had to learn how to distingush he self from tsemotions-to ee that there was a something hich ould be drawnout of the whirlpool.

The teaching f this wasfirst rought o them by the drama.The watching f a Greek tragedy was no matter f haphazard

attendance. t was an incredibly olemn erformance, edged oundwith eremony, ortentous, uthoritative; aking lace n the presenceof the High Priest and overhungwith an awe-inspiring eligiousatmosphere. What was the object? It was to teach the facing femotion-to bjectify motional truggle.

The solemnity ithwhich he drama wasregarded n Greek duca-tion can only be understood hen we realise that t originated t a



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126 MUSIC AND LETTERS

time when man had not learned to look at himself-to recognise asomiething n him which could

rise from disaster and defeatThe stronger.

External confiict he man of those days understood: fighting anto man, or man to beast, he unlderstood. But internal truggle nddevelopment ad to be made real to him; and the way this was donewas by putting him on the stage and making him look at himself-making him watch man under stress, under mental conflict, restling

with inward problems. The great figures f the tragedies were putbefore he Greek to objectify is inner experiences, ll confused ndoverwhelming s they were, to make him realise his need of self-knowledge; and the great figures were masked, to teach him hisneed of self-control-masked, too, that the sight of an actor spersonality might not confuse the issue.

In a later age, the same teachinig ame to them n a subtler form.The great age of the drama, having fulfilled ts purpose, enteredupon its inevitable decline, and was succeeded by the SocraticDialogue, of which the whole purpose is to make man look inwardand behold his own thoughts pon the stage of his mind.

NowPlato treats of music n a number f passages in the Dialogues,and it is clear that he is looking back to an enlightened past andseeing that the Greeks of his day have come very far away fromthe original purity of the idea of music. He also knew-what is sohard for us to realise-that people had not, so far, thought aboutmusic in the abstract, They had accepted t: they had not analysedits effects r expressed

themselves bout it. So now Plato is goingto make them search into music and its implications, nto themselvesand their relation to music, and the famous passage in T he Republicon the place of music in education s a survey of miusical buses-acondemnation f its misuse as an excitant and as a narcotic-theintention being to purge both music and men of these decadentinfluences and to restore music to its rightful place as the chiefharmoniser f ife. Music and men, Socrates perceives, have becomeall confused and weakened with emotional expression. Men have

got a wrong dea of music. lTe sees that his countrymen s reat weak-ness is in lack of self-control, nd he sees that the true function fmusic is to control the unruly, untidy emotional nature in man, totune it to the divinely ntended temperance. He depicts his idealcitizen as one who does not give way to lamentation under grief.What need, then, shall we have of those kinds of music which expresslamentation? Drunkenness and softness will be utterly foreign to



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EMOTIONAND MORALSIN GREEK MUSIC 127

him: let us then have no more of those relaxed kinds of music whichinduce sluggishness nd feebleness of purpose. Two kinds of musiconly, says Socrates, will be needed. I want to have one warlike, tosound the note which a brave man utters; and another to be usedin the mood of peace. Leave me just these two strains-the strainof necessity and the strain of freedom; the strain of courage andthe strain of temperance: these, I say, leave.

There is not much encouragement n this for self-expression. Itis self which music is to control.

And here, perhaps, we have the clue to the vexed question of

Ethos-the moral value of music-the notion of which has been sobeloved by the sentimentalists nd so loathed by the learned. If weunderstand lato s view that music should be valued as the controllerof emotionalism-of those feelings which upset a man s clear judg-ment, of all that lower, stupid, lazy self which hampers the higherself-if we understand hat, we shall not expect to find that it wasan acceptable view to his countrymen: we shall not be surprised ofind hat it was speedily challenged, that it gradually ook on garbledforms, and that by the time of Aristoxenos, writer of the earliest

treatise extant on Greek music, ethos has come to mean, notabsolute moral value in any actual music, but the appropriatenessof a combination f mode, genus and rhythm n the treatment f agiven subject. Clearly there has been a spiritual hrinkage which hasreflected tself in poverty of material resource, for the subsequenthistory of the Greek modes shows a gradual stultification. Therich and sensitive nharmonic f Plato s time s succeeded by the morelimiting hromatic, nd that again by the prosaic diatonic; until withthe martyrdom f Saint Cecilia of Rome, the soul of Greek music maybe said to have perished. The corpse was finally embalmed andenshrined n the ecclesiastical modes.

Music, as we know it, has come into being since then. It hasclimbed slowly and, at times, painfully, ut of a tomb, and to-dayseems exhausted by the effort. What will give it the needednew vitality? Perhaps our present onging to justify the Greeks asmusicians is an emotion which will bring us into touch with theirsources of inspiration nd their ethos.

KATHARINEE. EGGAR.


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Emotion and Morals in Greek Music

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