WARREN ANDERSON
The earliest evidence concerning music instruction is in the Homeric poems and is both scanty and puzzling. In the Odyssey, Homer used two bards as characters: Phemius of Ithaca, who claimed to be ‘self-taught’ and then added ‘but a god has inspired ways of song of every kind in my heart’ (xxii.347–8), and the Phaeacian Demodocus of whom Alcinous remarked that ‘the god bestowed song on him’. Later in the poem Odysseus compliments Demodocus with the conjecture that either the Muse or Apollo had taught him (viii.44, 488). Such references may have provided Homer with a way of contrasting the individual judgment evident in his compositional skill with the mere reconstituting of traditional narratives by bards of his own time, men who depended heavily on techniques acquired from training. Yet there must have been a professional tradition that enabled men to perform a great variety of heroic songs accurately, with expert knowledge (viii.489, 496; xi.368), and instruction must have been a highly important part of tradition. Although Homer did not acknowledge these antecedents, his own poetry testifies to their existence.
Only one passage in the Iliad bears on the question of music instruction. When the envoys of Agamemnon seek out Achilles, they find him playing a lyre and singing of the exploits of past heroes (ix.186–9). The splendidly ornamented instrument belongs to him only as part of the spoils of war, but he can play it and sing to its accompaniment. Although Homer offered no explanation of how such abilities, which are not treated as exceptional, may have been acquired, he related that Achilles had been entrusted as a child to the tutelage of Phoenix, an exile befriended by his father Peleus (ix.438ff), and such associations of a younger man with an older one were to characterize Greek society and education for as long as these remained aristocratic. There is a mythical counterpart in the tradition, frequent in sources after Homer (e.g. Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music, 1145e, 1146a), that Achilles learnt music from the centaur Chiron, who is named in the Iliad (xi.832) as Achilles’ teacher in the use of healing drugs, and it was for a knowledge of these pharmaka and of music that he was especially celebrated in later literature. Hesiod, writing probably in the last part of the 8th century bce, already described the young Achilles as being in the centaur’s care (Catalogue of Women, ii.100–03 [the attribution of this work to Hesiod is, however, doubtful]; cf Iliad xvi.140–44, on the spear of Achilles as Chiron’s gift), and Homeric and Hesiodic references to Chiron combine to give a clear impression of his teaching methods whereby pupils spent the whole of their childhood and youth with him, and he was responsible for their total education including music. Although for the sake of the story of the Wrath he was replaced by Phoenix, both figures foreshadow that of the later paidagōgos, or ‘tutor’ in the literal sense of protector, and both represent an acceptance of the idea of sending young children away from home for their education. The way had been made less difficult for the eventual establishment of schools.
During the 7th and 6th centuries bce, when choral lyric developed and monody appeared, composer-poets brought new techniques from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland and particularly to Sparta, for a time the cultural centre of the Mediterranean world. The one approximation to education in a modern sense was the training of choruses for the many religious festivals. Usually this would have been done afresh for each occasion. Instances of special training, which may have been continuous, are also known, and these involved choruses of young girls who had been schooled in singing and dancing by such master teachers as Alcman, who had come to Sparta from Sardis, and Sappho of Lesbos. Choric instruction given to groups of young citizens must have been still another factor in the development of schools, which incorporated the old aristocratic scheme of individual relationships but were also compelled to go beyond it. The rehearsal instrument was probably the lyra, as confirmed by vase paintings in the later period. During the central classical age, after Sparta had again become a barracks state, children still received training in singing, lyra playing and dance. The Spartan educational system was militaristic like that of Crete, and aesthetic considerations were unimportant compared with the demands imposed by the city-state.
The master-pupil relationship of individual instruction in instrumental techniques may, as musicographers claimed, have existed from very early times. It had attained great eminence by the 5th century bce, when the Theban school of aulos playing introduced the profoundly influential element of virtuoso performance. In a wider context Pindar said, ‘Famous Thebes taught [epaideusan] me to be no stranger to the Muses’ (Maehler, frag.198a**1). Here the verb suggests a central concept, that of paideia, which is broader and far less formal in meaning than ‘education’, and which may be best translated as ‘culture’ (see Paideia). It parallels mousikē, which denoted a unity of sung text and instrumental accompaniment considered as the accomplishment of freeborn men. A third term, which was to become important as a connection between the other two, is ēthos (see Ethos). Belief in ‘character’ formed by mode and rhythm working together with text (logos) provided the central rationale for musical training throughout the Hellenic period.
During the early decades of the 5th century bce, signs of strain and division had begun to appear and are evident in Pindar’s poetry. Although thoroughly professional, Pindar believed in the old aristocratic tradition so strongly that he could honour what men (his reference is clearly to lyric poets) knew through their nature, what was ‘in their blood’, and not simply because others had taught it to them (Olympian, ii.86–7). That tradition lost its force as the nobility increasingly gave way to a rising and ambitious middle class, and by the first half of the century Athenian families had begun to send their young sons to schoolmasters. For one of the three divisions of the elementary curriculum pupils would go eis kitharistou (Aristophanes, Clouds, 964), ‘to the kithara teacher’. Although the aulos became popular for a time after the Persian wars, it disappeared from the curriculum in about 440 bce. In some instances at least, girls received a training comparable to that of boys. Thus for the first time something like systematic schooling in music was instituted, although the arrangements were voluntary and probably received no state support. A passage in Plato’s Crito (50d–e) may indicate that attendance had become compulsory by the end of the century, but this is far from certain. More is known about the nature of the instruction itself. The kitharistēs taught lyric poetry in addition to the techniques of lyra playing. It is probable that originally he was the only teacher, the grammatistēs and paidotribēs being added later to teach ‘letters’ and to provide physical training respectively. The former taught epic and gnomic poetry, which was performed without musical accompaniment but involved a good deal of expressive gesture; the latter had an aulete in attendance for correct timing in the exercises.
Attic vase paintings provide the best and almost the only substantial evidence of the kithara teacher’s methods. Apparently instruction was always individual, although other pupils were often present. Both teacher and pupil had a lyra and played simultaneously (see illustration). In depictions of aulos playing, sometimes only the pupil is shown with the double pipes, while the teacher accompanies him on a Barbitos and apparently sings as well. Neither singing nor dancing was taught as a separate subject. The methods of imitation and repetition that characterized ancient education must have provided the fundamentals of procedure, and the use of mnemonic techniques is likely. Systems of notation seem to have had no importance for music education during the Hellenic age.
It was this system that Aristophanes (see his lively description in the Clouds, 961–83) and later Plato (Protagoras, 329a4–b6) described as hē archaia paideia – ‘the good old-fashioned training’. It is incorporated, with adjustments, into the educational system of Plato’s ideal state (cf Republic, iii, 401d5–8), and individual warnings in both the Republic and the Laws (most notably vii, 812d1–e6) bear witness to the importing of virtuoso techniques even into school exercises. The problem was no longer merely one of displays on the aulos, since the former supremacy of chanted or sung text had been overturned by a group of radically innovatory composer-poets, the most famous of whom was Timotheus. This so-called ‘new music’ proved intolerable to conservatives such as Aristophanes and Plato, who were concerned with paying tribute to the past. It is in the preoccupations of Aristotle and Isocrates that the shape of things to come can be discerned: the one gave a new respectability to pursuing musical and literary studies for the sake of cultured diversion (Politics, viii.5/1339a21–6, b14–15); the other made them secondary to the persuasive power of prose, using the term philosophia in place of mousikē and giving it the meaning ‘rhetoric’ (Antidosis, 181). Rhetorical studies, which had first gained prominence through the efforts of Sophists, now became the basis of Hellenic education. Nevertheless, practical training in music continued to be given at every level, and inscriptional evidence has survived from the Greek islands and the coastal cities of Asia Minor, especially Teos. Much less is known, even indirectly (as in Terence’s grouping from the Eunuchus, 476–7), about Athens. The Teians had two types of lyre teacher, one for ‘plectrum style’ and the other for ‘finger style’, and yearly examinations in music. The curriculum included notation exercises (rhuthmographia and melographia, the latter also used in Magnesia), which were apparently a Hellenistic innovation. The twofold method of lyre teaching also appears in inscriptions from Chios and Cos. Civic performances, often competitive, of choruses or soloists continued to be held at Athens and elsewhere as late as the 1st century bce. In general, however, music study during the Greco-Roman period was nothing more than a minor part of the curriculum of training colleges for ephebes, young men of 18 or older. Thus Plutarch (Quaestiones conviviales, ix.1.1) described it as taught at an Athenian gymnasium. There are isolated instances of ephebic choruses specially trained to sing in praise of a Tiberius or a Trajan, but the time when music had been a central cultural force had passed.
See also Greece, §I.
Livy (iii.44.6; v.27.1; vi.25.9) spoke of schools established at Rome, Tusculum and Falerii in the middle and at the end of the 5th century bce, but if they existed, it is most unlikely that their curriculum included music. In spite of the example of the Greek city-states in southern Italy, Hellenic culture made no serious inroads into the Roman aristocratic way of life until the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce, when elementary and secondary schools were set up on Greek models. Although little is known about them or the ‘Latin’ secondary schools added during the same period, scattered references (e.g. Cicero, De oratore, iii.23.87) indicate some teaching of singing, dancing and instrumental performance. The fact that Varro ranked music among the liberal arts (see Varro, Marcus Terentius) does not (pace Hug, 890) constitute evidence that at the close of the Republic it was part of a rounded education, and so far as general schooling was concerned, it seems never to have been more than one of many optional subjects offered, in what can only have been a hasty and superficial manner, by the grammaticus latinus. Well-bred Romans of the Republic looked on music with more suspicion than pleasure. A highly developed sense of decorum made dancing particularly offensive, and a markedly practical approach to education allowed little place for vocal or instrumental training, although Cicero spoke with sincere admiration of skill in lyre playing as a mark of the Greek gentleman (Tusculan Disputations, i.2.4). Among the Romans of Cicero’s period, a woman who valued her reputation could risk showing a certain measure of such skill, but not too much (Sallust, Catiline, xxv.2). The ability to perform remained, at best, at the modest level necessary for passive enjoyment in adult life. Such exceptional occasions as the public performance in 17 bce of Horace’s Carmen saeculare required the training of a chorus of freeborn singers, very much in the Hellenic manner. According to Livy (xxvii.37.7), choral performances of this kind went back to the year 207 bce. Moreover, since about the end of the 1st century bce various Roman men of letters, including Caesar and Cicero, had studied at the centres of higher education in Greece; since Rome had begun to acquire provinces within the Greek cultural sphere (Sicily, added in 227 bce, was the first), cultivated young men had spent tours of duty in them. A number would have gone out already trained to some extent in writing poetry, and for some these experiences as students or aides-de-camp may have brought, or perhaps refined, the ability to make skilled musical settings of their lyrics.
Just as there appears to be no evidence that musical studies constituted a regular and important part of a Roman’s schooling during the closing decades of the Republic, no broad pedagogical base is evident for the startling popularity of music as a cultivated skill among wealthy Romans of the empire, particularly among the emperors themselves. From Nero to the pseudonymous figures observed dispassionately or scornfully by the poets, these men and women required teachers, and the case of Pliny’s wife, who set his verses to the lyre ‘non artifice aliquo docente’ (‘without being taught by a professional’; Epistles, iv.19.4), is exceptional. Indeed some were willing to pay fees, rousing the notice of Martial (iii.4.8; v.56.8–9) and Juvenal (Satires, vii.175–7), and this cultivation of music, ranging from dilettantism to mania (Juvenal, vi.76–7, 380–97), had nothing to do with an educational system. Educators of the early empire came to value a practical knowledge of melody and rhythm principally for the contribution it could make to a mastery of rhetoric. Their attitudes are documented at length in Quintilian’s famous treatise Institutio oratoria.
Thus the ‘music’ that patristic and medieval educators inherited as part of the Quadrivium bore the stamp of much Roman theorizing, but had mostly originated in the harmonic ratios and music of the spheres of Plato’s Timaeus: it was an abstraction wholly divorced from aural reality. The legacy of Roman educational theory was not musical, but literary and rhetorical. By the time of Alexander, the Greek kitharistēs had become unimportant in comparison with the grammatistēs and the grammatikos, who were responsible for primary and secondary training in literature, or with the rhētor who taught oratory. The duties of the secondary-school teachers of literature were duplicated by those of the grammatici latini, whose system of instruction set a pattern that was to prevail for 2000 years.
See also Rome, §I.
A. Hug: ‘Musikunterricht (historisch)’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xvi/1 (Stuttgart, 1933), 884–92
W. Jaeger: Paideia: die Formung des griechischen Menschen (Berlin, 2/1936–47/R; Eng. trans., 1945/R)
H.I. Marrou: Histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité (Paris, 1948, 6/1965; Eng. trans., 1956/R)
M. Wegner: Das Musikleben der Griechen (Berlin, 1949), 102ff
F. Lasserre: ‘L’éducation musicale dans la Grèce antique’, Plutarque: De la musique (Olten, 1954), 13–95
F.A.G. Beck: Greek Education 450–350 BC (New York, 1964)
G. Fleischhauer: Etrurien und Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1964), 104
W.D. Anderson: Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge, MA, 1966)
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 406–93
K. Ioannides: Rhuthmos kai harmonia: hē ousia tēs mousikēs kai tou chorou stēn platōnikē paideia [Rhythm and harmony: the essence of music and dance in Platonic education] (Leukosia, 1973)
C. Lord: Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca, NY, 1982)