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23 Later Euripidean Music ERIC CSAPO In memory of Desmond Conacher, a much-loved teacher, colleague, andfriend. I. The Scholarship In the last two decades of the twentieth century several important general books marked a resurgence of interest in Greek music: Barker 1984 and 1989, Comotti 1989a (an expanded English translation of a work in Italian written in 1979), M. L. West 1992, W. D. Anderson 1994, Neubecker 1994 (second edition of a work of 1977), and Landels 1999. These volumes provide good general guides to the subject, with particular strengths in ancient theory and practice, the history of musical genres, technical innovations, the reconstruction and use of ancient instruments, ancient musical notation, documents, metrics, and reconstructions of ancient scales, modes, and genera. They are too broadly focussed to give much attention to tragedy. Euripidean music receives no more than three pages in any of these works (a little more is usually allocated to specific discussion of the musical fragment of Orestes). Fewer books were devoted to music in drama. Even stretching back another decade, we have: one general book on tragic music, Pintacuda 1978, two books by Scott on "musical design" in Aeschylus (1984) and in Sophocles (1996), and two books devoted to Aristophanes' music, Pintacuda 1982 and L. P. E. Parker 1997. Pintacuda 1978 offers three chapters on basic background, and one chapter for each of the poets. The chapter on Euripides (shared with a fairly standard account of the New Musicians), contains less than four pages of general discussion of Euripides' relationship to the New Music (164-68), which is followed by fifty pages of blow-by-blow description of the musical numbers in each play—a mildly caffeinated catalogue-style already familiar from Webster 1970b: 110-92 and revisited by Scott. Despite the ostensible focus on song or "musical design" in dramatic music, these works are mainly concerned with metrics, musical taxonomy, and questions of function within the dramatic narrative, all of which, though relevant, are not the same thing as musical design. Also highly relevant to Euripides' music is the massive study of the 400 Illinois Classical Studies 24-25 (1999-2000) Euripidean chorus by Hose (1990-91). I have not seen Jane Beverley's recent Oxford dissertation on Euripidean monody (1999). Given the nearly exclusive focus upon music's ethical, social, and political values by our fifth- and fourth-century sources, one might have expected more on musical culture and performance. But the discovery that music has a sociology, and a very central role in cultural discourse, even within general musicology, dates only to the late 1980s, and is no earlier in Classics.' Indicative is the segmentation of Neubecker's bibliographical survey (1990) of works on music published between 1958 and 1986. The largest categories are ancient theory and notation (17.4%), and reconstructions of ancient instruments (15.7%); the smallest categories are ethics and aesthetics (2%), musical education (1.7%), and music therapy (0.9%). A handful of other works of cultural-historical interest ends up in sections labelled "Spezielle Gebiete und Gesichtspunkte," or "Varia." By contrast, Gentili and Pretagostini 1988 includes a section devoted to "Musica e societa." The 1992 International Colloquium on Athenian Democracy and Culture included a short survey by Beschi (1996) on democracy and music, a topic which might scarcely have seemed viable ten years earlier. The forthcoming collection edited by Murray and Wilson will be entirely devoted to the study of music as social practice and cultural discourse in Classical Athens. Of the many articles on ancient music published in the last two decades, the following are of particular interest for tragedy, Euripides, or New Music: Richter 1983 examines change in tragic music in relation to its social and historical context. Wilson has illuminating discussions of the significance of pipe music (1999) and the music of stringed instruments (forthcoming [b]) to the Athenian imagination (cf. Wilson in this volume). Some recent work has been done on the social and economic background of the auletic profession in general (Nordquist 1994; Scheithauer 1996 and 1997). We eagerly await the specific study of theatre auletes by Wilson (forthcoming [a]). Edith Hall has written two fascinating studies of the significance of actors' song in drama (1999a and forthcoming). The social and ideological function of the tragic chorus has received a lot of attention lately (especially Castellani 1989; Gould 1996; Goldhill 1996; Mastronarde 1998 and 1999), but music (perhaps oddly) plays only a small part in this debate. My own contribution (Csapo, forthcoming [a]) to the volume by Murray and Wilson seeks out the links between the socio-economic, professional, technical, stylistic, ethical, and political sides of the New Music. Of direct relevance for the study of New Music is the slim volume (1992) and articles on dithyramb by Zimmermann (1989, 1993). Two startling facts emerge from this discussion. First, there is no extended single study devoted to New Music. Second, Euripides is the only fifth-century dramatist never to have a major work dedicated to his music. ' For developments in musicology, see N. Cook 1998: 87-104. Eric Csapo 401 This leaves gaps precisely where the material is richest. The New Musical revolution is probably the single most widely commented cultural event of antiquity: The great controversy it sparked has left us with plentiful, if scattered, evidence for its reception, which, if collected, might fill a good- sized volume. Much of it, whether comic parody, historical anecdote, or musicological commentary, offers a relative wealth of information on Euripides' innovations and on his performance style. We also have far more remains of Euripides' lyrics than of any other Classical poet. Even sixty-six notes survive on two different papyri that might go back to his original "scores." (The only other possible remnant of fifth-century music, by Sophocles or his grandson of the same name, was published by M. L. West as recently as 1999.) We owe this wealth of text, commentary, and musical notation to the fact that Euripides' songs made a greater impact on contemporary and later audiences than those of any other musician or dramatist.^ II. The New Music The label "New Music" is a coinage of modern scholarship.^ When the ancients spoke collectively of the new style of musical performance that emerged between about 430 and 380, they spoke of "theatre music," or otherwise associated the music with the theatre and with mass audiences."^ Modern treatments generally pay insufficient attention to this detail. They present New Music with a series of mini-biographies of Phrynis, Melanippides, Kinesias, Timotheus, Euripides, Agathon, Philoxenus, and Telestes, as if the movement could be adequately treated as a relay of influence by one composer to another. This stress on individual creativity follows the instincts of ancient (mainly Peripatetic),^ no less than modern (post-romantic), art history. But the price of historical individualism in art history here, as elsewhere, is the misrecognition of the social and economic factors which make innovation acceptable, desirable, or consistent enough to be reckoned coherent movements. For the purposes of cultural history, "New Music" can be better understood, with the ancients, as "theatre music." New Music's association with the theatre was anything but casual. It mainly affected the theatrical genres of dithyramb and drama.^ Its heyday 2 See Michaelides 1978; E. Hall 1999a: 99. ^ In order to reduce the compass of this very short historical introduction, I have kept to a minimum those arguments and annotations which I have treated more fully in Csapo, forthcoming (a) and (c). * PI. Lg. 700a-01d; Arist. Pol. 1342al8; Aristox. frr. 26, 29 da Rios; Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1140d-f, 1142d(aicnviicri). ^Seee.g. Arist. Mer.993bl5. ^ Also nome, performed by the same poets as dithyramb, and also for large audiences, and eventually in theatres. 402 Illinois Classical Studies 24-25 (1999-2000) coincides with the time of the theatre's first great expansion. In Attica, apart from the City Dionysia, we have no certainly attested dramatic festivals until after 440, but by the mid-fourth century there were at least fifteen. Dithyramb too spread to another eight or nine festivals at this time. Outside Attica, theatrical festivals are certainly attested for Macedonia at the end of the fifth century and probably for Syracuse, Taranto, Metapontum, Argos, Eretria, and Isthmia. Drama was widespread in Greece by the mid-fourth century, and ubiquitous by the late fourth century. Outside Athens dithyrambic contests are attested in the fifth century at Delos and Delphi, and by the end of the fourth century at Thebes, Keos, Euboea, lasos, and probably Thasos. Theatre had a profound impact both on the economics of musical performance and on the sociology of patronage, performance, and spectatorship. With the building of large theatres and the creation of annual theatrical festivals, musical performance attained an unprecedented magnificence and frequency. Its cost had far outgrown aristocratic patronage; only tyrants and democracies could afford it. The Athenian democracy did so with a complex combination of public and private money, not to mention entrance fees, appearing for the very first time in Greece. Democratic theatres, at least, were less "sponsor-directed" (Bremer 1991: 59), more consumer-oriented, and considerably less bound to tradition. For the various interests engaged in theatrical production, success was measured entirely by the satisfaction of the theatre public, which sat in judgment over the competition—in theory at least the judges not only represented but were expected to gauge the public preference. The audience felt, not only free, but obliged to give frequent expression to its approval and disapproval. The "mass entertainment industry" which grew up in the theatres came to support a larger and more specialized class of professional performers than had ever been seen in Greece.
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