Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE I'M A LESBIAN…

W

ell, who knows, it could have been the tide of a song. But before we get down to business, we need to see what sort of artistic world this Terpander chap was born into. You see, somewhere, somehow, between here and the old court musicians in Egypt, music had gone from being pretty much nothing to pretty much everything. Music, the Greeks now believed, was the bringer of all things good. It shaped morals. It educated. The 'aural' pleasure of music was but the tiny tip of the iceberg. Music was much more important than just the smile it raised. It was, also, not just about music. Music to the Greeks - mousike - meant three things: dancing and poetry, as well as music itself.

Terpander of Lesbos lived from 712 to 645??, and was probably born in Antissa on the north-western side of the island. He is credited with inventing the seven-stringed lyre and, whether he did or not, he certainly made a big enough noise with it at the 26th ancient Olympiad, held in Sparta, to become a bit of a national hero. If this wasn't enough to win him fame and fortune, he also allegedly started the first music schools in Sparta.

Around the same time, a more legendary character was also making a bit of a splash in the music world. Arion was a native of Samos, a famous musician working at the court of Periander, the king of Corinth. These days, he is largely remembered for two things: first, that he introduced the idea of 'strophes' and, thus, 'antistrophes' -that is, the alternating parts of a stanza. Secondly, though, and slightly more interestingly, he is also remembered for what happened to him at sea. On the way back from a music competition in Sicily, his boat was stormed by pirates, who robbed him and were about to throw him overboard when Arion asked that he be allowed to sing one last song. He took up his lyre and sang so beautifully that dolphins gathered around the boat. When he was finally made to walk the plank, he got a lift on the back of a dolphin and was ferried safely to the shore. I do love a happy ending.

The next major character in the incomplete and utter history of Greek music is the multi-talented Pythagoras. No, there weren't two people named Pythagoras - this is the very same person who lived from 580?? and came up with the theorem for right-angled triangles. If you think about it, though, music was at much the same point in its development as mathematics and science, so it's not surprising that a philosopher/mathematician would, at some point, focus his attentions on music. Pythagoras more or less came up with the scale we have today. Legend has it that he got some of his inspiration from watching and listening to a blacksmith at work hammering. Noticing ih.it the hammers all produced different sounds, he discovered that ihcy weighed 12, 9, 8 and 6 pounds each. It's said that, from this, he derived the intervals of an octave, a fifth, a fourth and a tone. If true, 11 wouldn't be the last time that making music and getting hammered had gone hand in hand.

Pythagoras died in around 475??.?? was overlapped, so to?•peak, by a guy called Pindar, a great Greek lyric poet, possibly the greatest. He was a 'Boeotian' - that is, both a resident of central? i recce and a particularly nasty turn of the letters from Carol in ('.ountdown. Pindar was a well-travelled nobleman and enough fragments of his work survive to make it clear that he more or less invented the ode. He was also a bit of a wiz on the aulos, the cithara, and the lyre. Clever clogs, no doubt, but a bit B-list when you compare him to the chap who came along just eleven years after he died - Mr Lato: Mr P. Lato.