Music, Language and Identity in Greece

Defining a National Art Music in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Polina Tambakaki, Panos Vlagopoulos, Katerina Levidou, Roderick Beaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351995504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The national element in music has been the subject of important studies, yet the scholarly framework has remained restricted almost exclusively to the field of music studies. This volume brings together experts from different fields (musicology, literary theory and modern Greek studies), who investi- gate the links that connect music, language and national identity, focusing on the Greek paradigm. Through the study of the Greek case, the book paves the way for innovative interdisciplinary approaches to the formation of the 'national' in different cultures, shedding new light on ideologies and mechanisms of cultural policies.

PART I

Contested histories

Greek art music in retrospect

1

Karl Otfried Müller and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos

Dorism, music and Greek identity

Christophe Corbier

The relation between ancient Greek music and Greek identity was self-evident to Romantic scholars. This chapter deals with the ideas on ‘Dorian’ music and arts as the purest expression of Hellenism, as they were promoted by one of the most important German philologists, Karl Otfried Müller. Whereas figures such as Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray agreed with them, Müller’s ideas were criticised by Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos in his History of Hellenic Civilisation (Histoire de la civilisation hellénique), published in Paris in 1878. Paparrigopoulos’s reaction to Müller will be discussed in relation to the ideological conception of the ‘Great Idea’ and Greek identity in modern times.

Müller, a professor of classical philology at the University of Göttingen from 1819 to 1840, was one of the greatest archaeologists and philologists of the first half of the nineteenth century. During his short lifetime (born in 1797, he died in Athens in 1840, after he had started excavations in Delphi), Müller wrote a series of seminal books, among them The Etruscans (Die Etrusker, 1828) and the Handbook for Archaeology (Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, 1830). His History of Greek Literature until Alexander the Great (Geschichte der griechischen Literatur bis auf das Zeitalter Alexanders) was left unfinished and was published posthumously in 1840, first in English translation. However, undoubtedly his most famous book is The Dorians (Müller 1844), which was translated into English, very shortly after its original 1824 German publication, with the title The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, and became well-known especially in France and Italy (Calder III and Schlesier 1998; Corbier 2014).

When he was a student at the University of Berlin around 1815, the young Müller was influenced by two prominent historians: Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) and August Böckh (1785–1867). Niebuhr was the author of a famous Roman History (Römische Geschichte, 1811), in which he reconstructed the origins of Italian cultures before the conquest of Italy by the Romans. He was particularly interested in Etruscan civilisation and pre-Roman cultures, and tried to write a history of archaic Italy based on songs – what became known as Niebuhr’s ‘ballad theory’ (Momigliano 1957). Müller would build on this theory in his own Dorians and Etruscans (Pflug 1979, 126–9).

Like Niebuhr, Böckh, the other prominent historian by whom Müller was influenced, was involved in the creation of a collection of Greek inscriptions (the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum). He was a professor at the University of Berlin from 1811 to 1861 and was much admired by his pupil Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884). Böckh was interested in music and collaborated with Felix Mendelssohn in the 1841 production of Antigone in Potsdam, for which Mendelssohn famously wrote the music (Flashar 1989). Böckh also created a new methodology named Sachphilologie (philology of objects). He believed that Greek antiquity needed to be approached not only through textual criticism; a philologist ought to be an historian too, if he wanted to give a comprehensive and global picture of ancient cultures (Horstmann 2006; Vogt 1979). In other words, Böckh believed that the philologist’s purpose was to reconstruct Greek culture by means of all available realia: arts, texts, coins and archaeological remains. He also linked philology and philosophy. By this he did not mean that historians had to forge a philosophical system that would explain the whole history of humanity in a Hegelian way. Böckh strongly criticised Hegel, his colleague in Berlin. He meant that philological analysis of realia ought to be based on Ideal-Type, or Ideas, because philology is ‘Erkenntnis des Erkannten’, ‘knowledge of the known’ or ‘acknowledgment of the known’ (Bravo 1968, 86ff). Böckh (1877, 500–1) in this way stressed specific qualities pertaining to ancient Greece: order, beauty, harmony in life, arts and morality. He referred to Winckelmann’s neo-classical concepts and agreed with his neo-platonic aesthetics. Within this context, Böckh claimed that, although our knowledge is extremely restricted owing to lack of archaeological evidences, we have no reason to doubt that ancient Greek music was excellent.

Böckh first applied his musical ideas to Pindaric odes. Ιn his edition of Pindar (1811–1821), which has been considered one of the most important works of German philology of the nineteenth century, Böckh took music into account, focusing on it more in his treatise De metris Pindari. According to his view, Pindar’s music expressed Dorian virtues: manliness, gravity, measure, sense of order. The alleged musical setting of the first lines of Pindar’s First Pythian Ode, published by Athanasius Kircher in his 1650 Musurgia universalis, was still held to be authentic at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Böckh viewed it as encompassing exactly this Dorian nature. The reason was the use in it of the ‘Dorian mode’, which Böckh had previously defined, with the help of Plato and Aristotle, as a ‘mode’ (a synonym for the diatonic scale of eight notes) of great severity and strength (Böckh 1811–1821, 266–9; see also below). A link was thus established between the ‘Dorian mode’, Pindaric odes and Dorian character – on the one hand, Greek philosophers and theoreticians provided evidence of the Dorian spirit of Pindar’s lyric poetry, and, on the other, metrical and rhythmic studies helped in the reconstruction of Greek music.

In his own theory of ‘Dorian music’ Müller built on Böckh’s analysis of archaic music. Like almost all prominent German philologists, poets and philosophers of the time (Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schelling, Wolf, Hegel, Tieck, Hölderlin), Müller was interested in ancient music, and most of his books contain a section about it. He aimed to reconstruct all features of a given culture, for example, that of the Etruscans and the Dorians, even though their music was lost or known only through iconography and texts. In this chapter I will focus on Müller’s The Dorians not only because this book was read by many a historian and musicologist during the nineteenth century in Germany and throughout Europe, but also because a whole chapter of it was dedicated to music. The chapter belonged to the book’s fourth (and last) part, whose aim was to look at architecture, poetry, clothing, music, education and food, so that Dorian culture would be analysed in all its facets: religion, political system, myths, everyday life and arts.

Müller’s chapter on music in The Dorians

The chapter on music is the longest in the fourth part of The Dorians. Müller develops there a new theory of Dorian music, as François-Joseph Fétis (1869–1876, 414–26) would point out forty years later in his General History of Music (Histoire générale de la musique). In Müller’s view, Dorian music must be connected with the Dorian Stamm, a German word difficult to translate: is it ‘race’, as we find in the English translation of Müller’s work? Yet the word Stamm is not equivalent to Rasse and it implies a kind of genealogy that is not really racist, even if Müller’s theories were criticised after the Second World War, because they were used in National Socialist Germany by admirers of Sparta’s authoritarian society (Losemann 1998). Today, it may be translated rather as ‘tribe’. We should notice here that Paparrigopoulos (see below) translated the word Stamm as ethnos into Greek and as race into French. In any event, Dorian music is a key element in Müller’s system because of its social and artistic function in Spartan education and in lyric poetry after Homer. However, music also played an important role in defining Greek identity in the 1820s, when Greece revolted against the Ottomans. This is evident, for example, in Claude Fauriel’s collection of folk songs (Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne, 1824–1825), even if it concerned only the text of folk songs and not their music. This was part of a wider question, which related to the comparison and relationship between ancient and modern music.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, scholars and historians had posed the question of whether ancient Greek music was ‘perfect’, as well as what was its legacy in modern times. At the end of his Essay on the Origin of Languages (Essai sur l’origine des langues, 1755; first published in 1782), Jean-Jacques Rousseau linked music and politics in ancient Greece, and claimed that Greek music and language were superior to their modern equivalents; being closer to the simple and primitive ‘vocal melody’, the ancient Greek language fitted in with democracy much better than French and Northern languages, which were coupled musically with harmony and politically with tyranny. There were of course opposite views. Charles Burney, for example, in the first volume of his General History of Music (published in 1776–1789; Romanou, Chapter 3, this volume), criticised ancient music not only because Greek musical theories were difficult to understand, but also because Greek music was too simple and primitive compared to European harmony (Grant 1983, 96–9). By the same token, Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1788, 4–19, 185ff) also criticised ancient Greek music, finding it inferior to modern European polyphony and its complex melodic and rhythmic structures.

Müller, like Böckh, strongly disagreed with Burney and Forkel and attempted to prove that Greek music, and especially Dorian music, was a perfect art on its own. But this was not an easy task. Art historians knew three orders, the Ionian, the Corinthian and the Doric, thanks to archaeological remains and Vitruvius. Philologists, on the other hand, studied the dialects of lyric poetry based on the texts of Pindar, Tyrtaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Aeschylus and so on. But how did Dorian music sound? What were the ‘modes’ (harmoniai) like? How was Pindar’s First Pythian ode performed? What instruments were used and how did musicians play them? In his De metris Pindari, Böckh had tried to answer these questions an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the contributors
• Editors’ preface
• Introduction
• PART I: Contested histories: Greek art music in retrospect
• PART II: ‘National music’: Kalomiris, Skalkottas and beyond
• PART III: Music and language: modern poetry, ancient drama
• Afterword
• Appendix: Greek composers setting poetry to music: a personal perspective
• Index