Naomi Weiss 1 in 1927, Nine Years After Claude Debussy's Death, The

Naomi Weiss HEARING THE SYRINX IN EURIPIDEAN TRAGEDY In 1927, nine years after Claude Debussy’s death, the editor of his previously unpublished solo flute piece, La Flûte de Pan, changed its title to Syrinx. The music was originally composed as incidental music for Gabriel Mourey’s dramatic poem Psyché, and seems to belong in Act Three, following the stage direction “Sometimes they [the nymphs] stop [dancing] completely, amazed, listening to the syrinx of invisible Pan, moved by the song that escapes from the hollow reeds” (“Par moments elles s’arrêtent toutes, émerveillées, écoutant la syrinx de Pan invisible, émues par le chant qui s’échappe des roseaux creux”).1 The music they hear is actually that of the flute representing the sound of the god’s panpipes, his syrinx, which is also sometimes referred to as a flute in Mourey’s text. The change of the piece’s title is commonly thought to refer to a myth that had little to do with Mourey’s play—the story of the nymph Syrinx, who, running from Pan’s amorous advances, is transformed into reeds, from which he fashions his instrument.2 But the title also encourages us still to hear the flute as the god’s syrinx, so that, even without the dramatic context, the music can create a mimetic effect, a conflation of two different but conceptually related instruments.3 A similar sort of instrumental mimesis must have regularly occurred in the classical Athenian theater, where, though the aulos (not a flute, but a double reed pipe) usually provided 1 Mourey, Psyché III.1. On the dramatic context of Debussy’s Syrinx, see Fulcher 2001: 132-33. It is clear from Debussy’s correspondence with Mourey that the piece was intended to be heard at a particular moment in the play: in a letter dated 17 November 1913 he writes, “So far I have not found what is needed…since a flute singing on the horizon must at once contain its emotion! ...Tell me, please, very exactly, the lines after which the music comes in” (“Jusqu’à ce jour je n’ai pas encore trouvé ce qu’il faut…pour la raison, qu’un flute chantant sur l’horizon doit contenir tout de suite son emotion! … Dites moi, je vous prie, très exactement, les vers après lesquels la musique intervient”). 2 As told in Ach. Tat. 8.6. 3 Debussy creates the impression of panpipes in other compositions as well, especially those which concern faun figures, such as the first piano duet in Six Epigraphes Antiques, of which the theme is “Pour invoquer Pan dieu du vent d’été” (“To invoke Pan, god of the summer wind”): see Raad 2005: 40. 1 Naomi Weiss the musical accompaniment to the songs of both actors and choruses, other instruments could be evoked as well. This phenomenon may have been particularly common in performances of the dithyramb and satyr play: in Pindar fr. 70b, one of the few surviving examples of the dithyramb, there is a very vivid acoustic and visual image of the “whirlings” of drums and noise of castanets (ῥόμβοι τυπάνων, / ἐν δὲ κέχλαδ[εν] κρόταλ’…, fr. 70b. 9-10), yet the genre by this point was “decidedly aulodic;”4 in Sophocles’ Inachus, which seems to have included a scene in which Hermes lulls the many-eyed giant Argus to sleep by playing on his syrinx, the music to which the chorus react could have been represented by that of the aulos, the standard instrumental accompaniment.5 This is not to say that other instruments would never have appeared in the Theater of Dionysus at Athens: the fragments of Sophocles’ Ichneutai, for example, include a long passage in which the satyr chorus fearfully responds to the sound of the chelys lyre, which could have been represented by the aulos, but may instead have been produced by a loud, concert kithara lyre offstage instead.6 This might have occasionally happened in tragedy as well, especially in plays in which a particular role required the playing of a lyre (or at least the illusion of it): Sophocles, playing the title role in the first performance of his Thamyras, apparently “took up and played the kithara;”7 a kithara might also have been used in Euripides’ Antiope, in which Amphion seems to have entered singing to his lyre (fr. 182a), before telling the chorus about the instrument’s history (frr. 190-92). But these two examples seem to have been exceptions, and in extant tragedy, instead of a particular instrument being central to a protagonist’s character, different types of musical sound are usually referred to in the choral songs, which would have 4 Power 2013: 240. Franklin 2013 argues that the early dithyrambs established by Arion in Corinth might have been performed to the accompaniment of the kithara: cf. Koller 1962. 5 On the syrinx as represented by an aulos here, see Power 2012: 297-98; Griffith 2013: 271. 6 Soph. Ich. fr. 314. 124-337, On the possibility of an actual lyre appearing in some form here, see Power forthcoming. On the intensely musical focus of this passage, see Griffith 2013: 269-71. 7 Life of Sophocles 5. On the use of a kithara in Soph. Tham., see Wilson 2009: 75; Power 2012: 298-30, 2013: 239. 2 Naomi Weiss been accompanied by the aulos.8 Like Pan’s syrinx in Mourey’s play, such descriptions of instrumental music, which are especially common in the later work of Euripides, would therefore be enacted through the performance of aulete in the theater. This sort of mimetic effect would have been particularly successful when the instrument described had some acoustic and/or cultural affinity with the one performed, as in the case of the urban aulos and the syrinx, its rustic cousin.9 We can see the close association of these two instruments in the use of the word syrinx to refer—at least in texts from the mid-fourth century BCE onwards—to a device that could somehow raise the pitch of the aulos (whether it was some sort of mechanism fitted to it or like the “speaker hole” of modern woodwind instruments is disputed):10 Aristoxenus, for example, writes that “when the syrinx is pulled down, the highest note of him who plays the syrinx, compared with the lowest of him who plays the aulos, would exceed the stated limit” (τῆς σύριγγος ὁ τοῦ συρίττοντος ὀξύτατος πρὸς τὸν τοῦ αὐλοῦντος βαρύτατον μεῖζον ἂν ποιήσειε τοῦ ῥηθέντος διαστήματος, 1.20-21).11 We do not know if an aulete would have made use of such a device in a tragic performance, but the vocabulary associated with it (σύριγξ, συριγμός, συρίζω) suggests that musicians imitated—or, more importantly, were perceived as imitating—the sound of the syrinx on the aulos.12 8 On the aulos as the primary musical accompaniment of tragedy, see esp. Wilson 1999: 76, with full bibiography; also Wilson 2008: 185-86. 9 Cf. Allan 2008: 324-25: “If the αὐλός-player in the theatre ever attempted to imitate other instruments mentioned in a play, the σῦριγξ will have been…among the easiest.” 10 On the nature of the syrinx device, see esp. West 1992: 86, 102-03; Hagel 2012. 11 Cf. ps.-Aris. De Aud. 804a14; ps.Plut. De Mus. 1137f4-38a6; Plut. Non posse vivi 1096b. συριγμός also refers to the hissing of a snake, and at the Pythian auletic contest it seems to have traditionally represented the dying serpent killed by Apollo, for which auletes tended to use the pitch-raising device called a syrinx: see Xen. Symp. 6.5, Strab. 9.3.10. The term’s technical meaning is therefore inextricably tied to its acoustic one, which links the sound of the syrinx as an instrument to whistling or hissing noises. 12 Writing many centuries later, Achilles Tatius compares the two instruments, seeing the syrinx as a combination of auloi: “The syrinx is in reality many auloi, and each reed is an aulos, while all the reeds together pipe (aulousi) just as one aulos” (ἡ σύριγξ αὐλοὶ μέν εἰσι πολλοί, κάλαμος δὲ τῶν αὐλῶν ἕκαστος· αὐλοῦσι δὲ οἱ κάλαμοι πάντες ὥσπερ αὐλὸς εἷς, 8.6.3). 3 Naomi Weiss The syrinx as an instrument referred to in a play’s text seems to be a latecomer to Athenian tragedy, mostly appearing in a cluster of plays by Euripides from the last two decades of the fifth century. The rarity of references to this long-used instrument in earlier tragedy may initially appear rather surprising, yet, unlike the aulos and lyre, the syrinx does not seem to have played a significant part in Athens: it is rarely represented in vase painting except in the hands of Pan, suggesting that, for many Athenians, it was associated more with the rustic imaginary than with everyday urban life.13 The herdsman’s syrinx must still have been a recognizable sound for the audience of tragedy, especially for those who came to the theater of Dionysus from more rural parts of Attica and beyond. In the archaic period at least, its music seems to have been part of wedding celebrations as well: the Muse Calliope plays it on both the François Vase (ca. 570 BCE) and the Sophilos Dinos (ca. 580 BCE).14 But given the general lack of evidence for this instrument having much prominence in classical Athens, it is perhaps more surprising that it should appear in any marked way in tragedy at all. The sudden frequency with which it is referred to in Euripides’ later plays corresponds, however, with his experimentation with the much-discussed “new musical” trends toward the end of the fifth century, and coincides with an increase in extended descriptions of mousikē (music, song, dance) in his work in general.15 The syrinx is mentioned in two extant tragedies prior to the 420s: Prometheus Bound, of which the authorship and date are far from certain (though the play seems likely to have been composed before the final quarter of the fifth century),16 and Euripides’ Alcestis, an unusual 13 On the syrinx in Greek (especially Athenian) life, see West 1992: 110-12.

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