An ancient Greek musical term, describing a concept important in the relationship between ancient Greek music and education.
3. Theoretical descriptions of the 5th century bce.
11. Late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN
The term occurs as a noun, ēthos, from Homer onwards. Its original meaning was ‘accustomed place’; Hesiod first used it as ‘custom’. With Heraclitus it acquired the added sense of ‘character’, more precisely ‘moral character’, often regarded as the result of habituation. When the term is used in English transliteration, ‘ethos’, with reference to ancient Greek music, the last-named meaning should be understood. Ethos should be taken as an attribute not merely of persons but also of musical phenomena, which are then considered as vehicles for conveying ethical attitudes, not as having any kind of moral nature in themselves.
Greek ethos theory brings together many aspects of a belief held by various Hellenic authors and by some later figures. These men, among them poets and philosophers of the greatest eminence, expressed in differing ways their belief that music can convey, foster and even generate ethical states. It must be emphasized that to a Hellene the notion of a ‘theory of ethos’ would have had no meaning. The notion of ‘die Lehre vom Ethos’ or ‘die Ethoslehre’ was developed primarily by German scholarship and creates the illusion of a single, continuing pattern of belief. Since the close of the 19th century the erroneousness of a unitary approach has been partly recognized; yet there is still need for an awareness that many differing views, sometimes sharply opposed, made up the shifting pattern of beliefs concerning musical ethos. An examination of some of these views will be undertaken here. The factors that must be considered include ethnic or literary associations, religious considerations and the physical qualities of modes or instruments.
When indications of ethos occur in poetry, they almost always concern mood rather than morality. Writing early in the 7th century bce the lyric poet Terpander described Sparta as the home of ‘the clear-voiced Muse and Justice’ but made no close connection between the two factors. Several decades later another poet of Sparta, Alcman, made the claim that Apollo played the aulos. This suggests strongly that at the time it was possible for Spartans to credit the instrument with a tranquil mood. Here the contrast with later Athenian opinion is extreme. At the beginning of the 6th century bce Stesichorus wrote of ‘delicately finding out a Phrygian melody’ to sing of the Graces in springtime. Phrygian modality was closely associated with the aulos throughout the classical period; the fact that Stesichorus presented it as gentle and joyous may support Alcman's statement. Again there is a strong contrast with what was to become the majority opinion, although Plato was willing to ignore the majority. Evidently a given mode or instrument might be credited at different times and places with distinctly different characteristics.
Pitch, resonance and timbre constitute the physical nature of a mode or instrument, considered in terms of experienced sound. Resonance was far more a property of the kithara than of the lyra; the penetrating quality of the aulos was well known. Variation in timbre was so narrowly limited by factors of construction as to be unimportant. Absolute pitch had no place in Greek music; relative pitch and tessitura, however, figured prominently. They are reflected in terms such as ‘intense’ (suntonos), ‘relaxed’ (aneimenos) and ‘slack’ (chalaros). Originally tuning descriptions, these came to be used to differentiate modes. Occasionally they were made to serve the additional (and wholly improper) purpose of conveying an ethical judgment; for writers of comedy, the temptation to make them do this was especially great. When the late 6th-century poet Lasus of Hermione called Aeolian a ‘deep-sounding’ (barubromos) mode he may merely have been seeking to describe its relative pitch, perhaps with a suggestion of timbre as well; or the description may actually apply to the deep tones of the long-stringed barbitos used by Aeolic poets. In either case, the dimension of ethos has not yet been added.
To an imperfect but recognizable degree, this addition was made at the beginning of the 5th century bce by an outspokenly conservative poet, Pratinas of Phlius. He counselled using Aeolian as a mean between the modal extremes of ‘tense’ and ‘relaxed’, and called it ‘well suited to all braggarts in song’. Since this mode was never a mean in any technical sense known to us, the reference would appear to concern the Mimesis of character traits. Neither anguished nor serene, it was thought to express the blithe and forthright manner of the Aeolian peoples. They could indeed be ‘braggarts in song’; the great Alcaeus is an example. Pratinas's remarks illustrate the ethnic type of ethos belief; although it reappeared periodically in Greek literature, it was hardly ever put forward seriously by a creative or analytical writer of the first rank. The value of what Pratinas said lies elsewhere. Like Terpander, he made no causal connection between modality and morality. He did, however, see appropriateness in the relationship between a musical mode and a mode of social deportment, which a Greek of the central classical period judged by moral standards.
Somewhat similar conclusions may be suggested concerning a fragmentary statement from the lost Paeans of Pindar, dating probably from the earlier decades of the 5th century bce; the ‘Dorian melody [melos] is [?the] most dignified’. The scholiast, or late commentator, who quoted the fragment asserted that Pindar was referring to the Dorian mode. The propriety of equating melody with mode gains support from a definition given by Winnington-Ingram (1936, p.3): ‘Mode may be defined as the epitome of stylised song, of song stylised in a particular district or people or occupation’. This was especially true in the 7th and 6th centuries bce. When Lasus, for example, referred to the Aeolian harmonia, he was probably thinking less of a scale pattern than of a melodic style that had become localized among Greeks who spoke the Aeolic dialect. It is undeniable that, in the present fragment, Pindar described Dorian melody with a term that seems entirely at home in the vocabulary of the later, fully developed doctrines of ethos. Nevertheless, a distinctively ethical valuation of music had not yet appeared. Pindar was concerned here with stateliness, not with the excellence of the soul. Although in the first Pythian ode he praised the power of music with singular exaltation, and although he gave cosmic meaning to the symbolism of lyre and harmonia, his fiercely aristocratic standards of honour and reverence are set far deeper than the level of any conscious principle of modal ethos.
The earlier decades of the 5th century, which produced Pindar's finest efforts as a poet-composer, also brought the first surviving theoretical statements concerning the ethical power of music. Much speculation has been devoted to the question of the ultimate origins of such views. Among the Greeks themselves there was a tendency to look to Egypt; Plato was one who did so, wrongly supposing that in matters of music Egyptian conservatism had never been shaken. It now appears likely that belief in ethos originated in a view of music as magically potent that was widely held throughout the Near and Middle East. The liberating force was Pythagorean theory, whereby musical phenomena were brought under the control of number and of proportionate relationship (one of the main senses of harmonia). This liberation held within itself the danger that a new kind of imprisonment might emerge from it, through a devotion to abstract harmonic relationships and cosmic values. The second escape, to a psychology and an aesthetic of musical expression, can be seen in the doctrines of Damon, a contemporary and friend of Pericles, as they compare with those of the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus of Tarentum.
According to Philolaus, the nature of number and relationship does not admit of falsehood. Number and truth, he asserted, are in close natural union; and it is in the cosmic force of harmonia that the disparate elements of the cosmos are interrelated and men are enabled to grasp reality. Although the authenticity of the fragments attributed to Philolaus remains under dispute, no one doubts that they represent Pythagorean doctrine. This is true also of the statement by Damon that musical activity arises out of the activity of the soul and affects its nature favourably or unfavourably. It is in his example of ‘liberal and beautiful’ songs and dances as beneficial that the departure from tradition begins to be evident. The first of these terms, which means ‘befitting a freeborn man’, shows a combination of social and ethical presuppositions, and the second seems prophetic of the view of the beautiful that was to take shape in 4th-century philosophy. The Damonian school is also credited with the doctrine that even in a continuous melody the notes create or bring out character through similarity. The reference may be to a simple stepwise melody.
Damon was the first musical theoretician who is supposed to have applied moral valuation to the metrical complexes known as rhythms. With this tradition, doctrines of rhythmic ethos made their earliest appearance. Plato ascribed to him the claim that changes in musical styles (tropoi) are always accompanied by radical changes in the laws of the state. This statement, in which the use of tropos may show the influence of Pythagorean terminology, has fundamental importance both for ethos and for education. Although he has been credited on too little evidence with too much influence, Damon is undoubtedly a major figure in the history of musical ethos. Through his direct agency or mediation, doctrinal foundations were strongly established. The system gives the impression of having appeared suddenly, almost as if without antecedents; yet this cannot have been the case. It is difficult to add anything to the hypothesis of a distant origin in magical beliefs of the Near and Middle East; but the currents of musical influence during the formative period were apparently running westward from Asia rather than northward from Egypt.
The later decades of the 5th century offer little evidence bearing upon ethos. When the Socrates of Aristophanes’ Clouds (649–51) speaks of familiarity with the rhythms as a social accomplishment, very possibly he was reflecting the playwright’s own low opinion of Damon's concern with metre. In any case, the vital ethical factor is not considered. As the century came to its end Timotheus of Miletus violently altered the time-honoured choral hymn to Dionysus, the dithyramb, making the text an elaborate libretto and filling the musical accompaniment with frequent modulations. He thereby did away with the possibility of any single and stable ethos, to the extent that modality could contribute to this.
In the early 4th century Plato condemned such practice. In all musical matters he commended singleness, simplicity and universality. Technical matters seldom came under discussion, for his interests lay elsewhere. Thus in the Symposium certain aulos melodies attributed to Marsyas are credited by Alcibiades with a unique power to grip the soul, whatever the performer's degree of skill may be; the ethos is wholly melodic and rhythmic. While Alcibiades could only comment on the power of music, Socrates as Plato's spokesman sought to account for it. In doing so he used Pythagorean estimates of the importance of number, the formal component that mode and rhythm hold in common. The dynamic process of ethos, he explained, consists in these two aspects of musical experience lodging fast in the soul's deepest recesses. A more abstract explanation is given by the real or fictitious Pythagorean scholar Timaeus in the dialogue that bears his name. Harmony has motions akin to those of the soul, which it can help to restore to an inner concord; in like manner, rhythm is an aid to inner gracefulness.
According to the Laws, pleasure does not constitute a valid part of ethos, being merely the result of habituation; but the kind of music to which one becomes accustomed makes a great deal of difference to the moral result. Accordingly, the place of music in education received close attention from Plato. Habituation also involves a belief in mimesis, and Plato fully recognized the role which this element plays in the forming of habits. He repeatedly failed, however, to reconcile the component of musical ethos which is mimetic of human attitudes with the rhythmic and melodic component of ethos. Thus it was impossible for him to maintain any coherent theory, although many of his individual insights are brilliant. Especially admirable is the realism so often evident in his discussions of the place of modality and rhythm in man's life, even when the lack of a central position produces uncertain or contradictory responses. He saw music as a vehicle of ethos through mimesis; and he held to this practical view even if it had to be at the expense of Pythagorean theories of number and cosmic harmony.
A papyrus of the 3rd century bce, the so-called Hibeh discourse, contains a sharp attack upon believers in musical ethos. There is some reason to believe that its contents were originally written not much later than 390 bce; they may thus be slightly earlier than Plato's Republic. Their unknown author (?Alcidamus) chose a variety of targets: fanatical harmonicists, the Damonian school and probably, on the subject of mimetic excellence, Plato himself. Trivial in tone and argument, the Hibeh discourse may gain its greatest distinction from the fact that it contains the earliest certain reference to ethical qualities associated with the genera. The author denied, for example, ‘that the chromatic makes men cowardly or that the enharmonic makes them brave’. Throughout much of the discourse the author attacked a general type of harmonicist for absurd extremes of behaviour, and was not so much concerned with such serious theorists of music as Damon or Plato.
Certain views maintained by Plato were taken up by his great pupil: belief in habituation as the source of character; recognition of music's influence on education for better or worse. It is the differences, however, that predominate. Aristotle avoided applying ethical terms to the actual experience of music. According to his theories of psychology and perception this experience was not an attitude of the soul but merely a pathos, something that happens to one. Moreover, he regarded music as a skill rather than a virtue; and in making this statement he substituted ta mousika, which approaches the meaning of the modern term ‘music’, for mousikē, the time-honoured concept in which music as such was fused with a literary text to form an unquestioned unity.
Aristotle's treatment of rhythm has not survived; when he dealt with mode, he was usually matter-of-fact. For the symbolic treatment of the harmonia by Pythagorean theorists, and for their use or abuse of number theory generally, he showed polite contempt. His flat pronouncement that the harmonia consists of notes and nothing else is typical. In one passage only did he devote some attention to practical problems of ethos: the long examination of music, considered as a part of education, with which the extant text of the Politics comes to a close. Here his disagreement with Plato becomes particularly evident. He declared repeatedly that education in music looks towards the later enjoyment of cultured diversion, not towards noble living. Paideia itself now has its restricted sense of elementary schooling rather than that of the lifelong culture experienced through music and poetry. Instrumental music is regarded as capable in itself of expressing ethos. The classification of the modes – evaluated according to the findings of unidentified experts – no longer has an ethical basis, and all of the modes are approved for discriminating use. Such discrimination is to be shown partly by providing vulgar audiences with a corresponding kind of music.
These practical recommendations are believed to have their theoretical basis in two propositions: that modes and rhythms contain ‘likenesses’ (homoiōmata) of every emotion and ethical state, and that we have a natural affinity for them. The theory of likenesses, which may owe something to Damon, was probably meant to be conformable to Aristotle's belief that in perception we receive the impression of the ‘form’ of an object. The claim of natural affinity for modality and rhythm, twice asserted, calls to mind Pythagorean beliefs relating to the soul's motion, although such a source seems unlikely. Probably the most provocative element in all the comments on music in the Politics involves the concept of katharsis, or purgation. Here the background is an old and primitive way of looking at ethos. The Pythagoreans had employed the allopathic variety of purgative therapy, whereas the Aristotelian method is homeopathic: a state of passion is relieved by rousing the same sort of feeling rather than the opposite sort. In the end there is no adequate explanation of katharsis, since it appears only for a moment in the Poetics. What might have been Aristotle's greatest contribution to ethos theory was never realized.
With Aristotle's pupil, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, begins the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman approach to music which resulted in a long series of handbooks on theory. Aristoxenus himself maintained a high ethical view of his subject; he lamented the passing of the old standards of performance. His concern, however, was practical (like Aristotle, he accepted all the modes as useful) and markedly empirical, and his interest lay in aesthetic theory rather than in doctrines of ethos. Much later, in the time of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara repeatedly attacked the presentation of such doctrines by a minor Stoic, Diogenes of Babylon. One example of these seems to have been the claim that music, when correctly used, creates a highly rhythmic and harmonious nature – this doctrine represents familiar orthodoxy since Damon's time. Diogenes was concerned mainly to present musical-ethical experience as rational, while Philodemus, as a follower of Epicurus, considered the whole of music irrational. Apart from the arguments of individual proponents, the distinctive feature of Stoic thought that has a bearing upon ethos is its treatment of the passions as disturbances within the soul. This view accords well with the remarks in the Timaeus on the power of rhythm and harmony to regulate the soul's motion. To insist upon music as rational, on the other hand, introduces a quite different element.
The technical handbooks of the late classical and early Christian centuries repeatedly offer ethical descriptions not only of modes but of genera, rhythms and even individual poetic feet. The abstractness of such system-making is far more evident than its usefulness. To consider what ethos meant to late theoreticians leads in most instances to a dead end, and for actual musical practice the safest conclusions to be drawn are probably the most general ones. Distinctions according to genus concern the varying position of the two inner notes of the tetrachord, giving the three main genera together with many chroai, or ‘shadings’. The ethos of the diatonic genus was thought to be virile, strong and austere. Eventually this strength was looked down upon as lacking in urbanity, but such a judgment signifies little more than a shift of popularity that had given one of the other genera a favoured position. The chromatic genus was usually associated with lamentation and womanish softness; the descriptions vary somewhat.
The case of the enharmonic genus is a special one. According to tradition, it first appeared in a form that did not have the semitone evenly divided into two dieses. This simpler version, attributed to the Asiatic aulete Olympus the Mysian, had strongly sacral associations from the beginning; it was used in some measure throughout the Hellenic period. The later enharmonic, with a divided semitone in the tetrachord, was described by the Greeks (not necessarily correctly) as the most recently introduced of the three genera. The fact that they honoured it so highly has been thought puzzling, and their ascription of ethos to it may have been founded upon a response to the earlier form. In the Hibeh discourse, the author's denial shows that some thought the enharmonic genus capable of making men brave – a belief that was at least well suited to the special connection (real or supposed) between this genus and Dorian modality. The fact that the Hibeh writer also denied that the use of the chromatic genus could cause cowardice shows a pattern of beliefs regarding generic ethos already formed, or taking shape, in the period when Plato wrote his Republic. Later in the 4th century Aristotle spoke admiringly of the melodies of Olympus, which probably retained the ‘primitive’ enharmonic. As the bitter comments of his pupil Aristoxenus make clear, the newer form of the genus had been almost forgotten by the time the century ended. It was replaced by the chromatic, which eventually gave way to a re-establishment of the diatonic. The latter development may, as Winnington-Ingram has suggested, be connected with a reappearance of modality from folk sources. If so, the areas of speculation concerning ethos widen appreciably.
According to Socrates in the Republic, Damon applied ethical descriptions to rhythms and also to poetic feet. The Aristophanic evidence noted earlier seems to support this statement. Socrates said little about the rhythms, preferring that questions of detail be addressed to Damon. He did state that they were mimetic, like the modes, and that they derived their proper pattern from the natural rhythm of a good life. In a description that recalls this principle, Aristotle spoke of the dactylic hexameter as the most sedate and stately of all metres; much later, the writers on rhythmic ethos called dactylic metres solemn. In the late handbooks, most of which are collected in Jan's Musici scriptores graeci, rhythms are categorized ethically according to a great variety of criteria. Long syllables were thought to convey exaltation and serenity, whereas short ones roused the hearer to wildness. The same criterion of syllable length was applied to individual feet, especially to the dactyl, and to the sequences beginning or ending a line of verse. Frequent pauses were considered agitating, and individual feet were classified further according to the even or uneven pattern of metrical units they embodied. Tempo (agōgē) had unusual importance: its variations could give different kinds of ethos to the same rhythm. Plato mentioned it as one of Damon's concerns.
To find further examples of fact or convincing conjecture that will support the theorizing of the handbooks is not always easy. It seems likely, as one possibility, that in his dealings with rhythmic ethos Damon used the comparative method associated with him, the sunkrisis of the Hibeh discourse. More important, in lyric and tragedy, from the 7th century bce onwards, metrical effects in both rhythms and feet were carefully chosen with reference to the emotional content of the text or the dramatic action or both. The handbooks offer elaboration and conjecture based upon the evident fact of this practice; the truly valuable source is the literature itself.
Late theorists mentioned additional ethical categorizations, but these can be noted here only in passing. The high, middle and low regions of the vocal or instrumental gamut were described as enervating, quieting and rousing, respectively. The terms probably derive ultimately from the triple classification of melodies mentioned by Aristotle in the Politics. Modulation (metabolē) might involve shifts among these regions, as well as between one scale or genus and another; a mysterious further type, used in melopeia, supposedly involved tetrachordal ethos in a special way that is not clear.
Granting that many other factors had a measure of importance, it is nevertheless impossible to escape the fact that Greek views on ethos were concerned primarily with modality. Several bases were proposed, some clearly stronger than others. A particularly weak choice was that of interpretation in terms of ethnic character. The 4th-century Academician known as Heraclides Ponticus attempted such an analysis. Religious considerations, another possible basis, were seldom mentioned prominently. The contrast between Apollo and Dionysus, between native Hellenic elements and alien oriental ones, has been given a disproportionate prominence by modern scholarship. A further possibility is that of characterizing a mode ethically through its technical properties. There are some instances of this in the treatise of Aristides Quintilianus and other Neoplatonic sources.
Finally there is the ethical description of a mode or rhythm through association with a form of literary composition, serious or popular. The fact that this offers no consistent basis of theory was made clear several times in the case of Phrygian. Nevertheless, association of ethos with literary forms in fact occurred much more frequently than any other association throughout the Hellenic period. The extremely wide range of this approach, from choral odes to drinking-songs, makes it the most nearly adequate single explanation of beliefs concerning ethos.
There is no one explanation, however, even as there is no one theory. The so-called ‘theory of ethos’ was made up of many views that differed widely at times and possessed as a common basis simply the conviction that music exerts a moral influence upon men. During the chief periods of creative and critical Greek thought, these views had importance for writers of the highest eminence; throughout succeeding centuries they established attitudes towards musical ethos that seriously influenced the thinking of the Romans and of their Christian successors.
In Roman culture, the process of transmission began during the 1st century bce, when the polymath Marcus Terentius Varro made ethical value his criterion in assessing the role of music. Writing around the beginning of the Christian era, the geographer Strabo referred to the ancient view of poetry as teaching virtue. He noted, moreover, that even in his own day music teachers claimed to impart culture and to improve moral character (ēthē, plural of ēthos). Quintilian, that most eminent of all Roman educators, associated music with rhetoric as Cicero had done. Evidently he believed in its ethical powers, and he spoke of the ‘silent power’ of rhythm and melody present even when instruments alone are employed. When he dealt with ethical problems themselves, however, what concerned him was the spoken word; and what he valued about music was its contribution to the training of the ‘good man skilled in speaking’, the orator.
Musical ethos was more characteristically associated with philosophy as a propaideutic. The connection was made by Philo Judaeus in the beginning decades of the 1st century ce, by certain of the 3rd-century Neoplatonic philosophers and eventually, in the early 6th century, by Boethius. During the patristic period, between the last two of these stages, attitudes varied according to locality. Basil the Great was typical of the Greek Fathers in taking his cue from Plato's discussions of the importance of music for education. Among the Western Fathers, Augustine of Hippo defined music as ‘knowing how to sing and play well’. This concept had already been put forward by Aristides Quintilianus, who had gone back to Damon and Plato and also to Aristoxenus. Its significance lies in its combination of an aesthetic dimension with an ethical one. Boethius ignored the first of these; and although he discussed the second at some length, he defined the true musicus strictly in terms of a rational and speculative command of the subject. For him, the propaedeutic virtue of music was that, like mathematics, it strengthened the rational powers and drew the soul into the realm of true being through the force of number, that is, Pythagorean number.
During the Renaissance and modern periods, the question of ethical power in music has not ceased to exercise the minds of theorists. It must nevertheless be acknowledged that the particular constellation of beliefs that constituted Hellenic ethos doctrine had no continuing existence. Individual elements reappeared at times, most vividly perhaps in the 16th century, when the comments of Plato and Aristotle were echoed by many and diverse admirers ranging from the Italian composer-theorists to John Calvin. But the glory had departed: the old Hellenic beliefs had been adapted to new ends, not only in the West but in India and the Islamic countries; and during this process of adaptation they were refashioned with increasing freedom. The history of their new forms is proper subject matter for a separate study.
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