‘Invocation of the Muse’ and ‘Invocation of Calliope and Apollo’

DAGM 24 and 25

Stef conner writes…

Introduction

This new blog documents the development of a new discipline in performance practice: experimental performance of music from a VERY long time ago. Using the broad description ‘Very Early music’ (borrowed from the 2014 Galway Early Music Festival) to describe our work, my brilliant collaborator Barnaby Brown and I want to share the process of trying to adopt as scientific as possible an approach to reconstructing ancient music, whilst retaining the freedom to experiment, imagine, and experience inspiration. To some, combining the word ‘scientific’ with the phrase ‘reconstructing ancient music’ will seem oxymoronic. And it is true that speculation plays leading roles in this drama. However, transparency is our guiding principle, and we hope that in trying to articulate some of our thought processes, we may illuminate ways in which that speculation interacts with rigorous enquiry, opening up to scrutiny some of the processes that are often kept secret in Early music—those moments when decisions are handed over from scholar, musicologist, or editor to performer and intellect passes the baton to imagination. These are moments that are not articulated, because they are inscrutable, intangible, and for many impossible to capture in words. Very Early music, by its very nature, forces performers to confront the issues that bubble beneath the surface of every performance of historical repertory. ‘Do we really know what we think we know?’ ‘What are the origins of our aesthetic preferences?’ ‘How far can we look from our immediate source for the information it does not convey?’ There are few scores for us to analyse from the ancient world, and those music notations that have survived are fragmentary, sparse, and difficult to interpret. In a way, being separated from the ‘science’ of analysing scores forces us to confront the deeper questions about what we do. And for that reason, however much we must speculate in order to produce any sound at all, we believe that articulating the process has scholarly value and the potential to change the way we think about historical performance.

I will use this blog to provide short commentaries on my work, in order to elucidate the methodology behind it and to allow interested people to trace the historical sources and scholarly authorities that inform it. Over the course of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Huddersfield I will provide information about all of my musical outputs, however short or ‘imaginative’, including videos, recordings, live performances and audio CDs. I will strive to outline how my music is informed by scholarship, highlighting and explaining its evidence-based elements in order to make transparent what comes from the sources (notwithstanding the inevitable distortion of interpretation) and what simply comes from me.

In Very Early music, as in all historically informed performance, musicians must combine the interpretation of historical sources with subjective aesthetic choices and unconscious preferences. In providing this series of commentaries I hope to provide some clarity on how those processes intersect, in the service of reproducibility, comprehensibility, accountability and, above all, honesty. The limitations and compromises of my outputs are here laid bare—in as much detail as I consider appropriate for this medium—in the interest of robust discourse!

The first commentary in this series accompanies a video of two songs by Mesomedes of Crete (2nd century CE), a court musician to the Emperor Hadrian. This particular project is probably 90% creative and 10% academic, since I am still very much a beginner when it comes to performing ancient Greek music and am completely dependent on the research of others much more expert than I to make any sound at all! In this specific case, I have drawn on the practical advice and research of Barnaby Brown and Armand D’Angour, as well as the important work published by Martin West and Egert Pöhlmann. Other commentaries will follow that showcase musical outputs drawn from my own research, and which respond to the work of others in more depth, but since I have committed to sharing all of the performances and practical projects I undertake during this Fellowship, I must begin with this one, which betrays a proficiency in ancient Greek performance that is still very much in its infancy. I am a musician above all, so whatever stage I am at in studying a performance tradition, I will make and disseminate music along the way! Perhaps this is ‘naive’ music, but I hope it is also nice to listen to. We must all begin every new endeavour at the beginning, after all. I fully anticipate that a few years from now I will look back on some of these musical decisions in horror, but I wish to share the whole journey… because in Very Early music ‘failure’ is inevitable. We must expect it, embrace it, and unashamedly own it! Our sources are fragmentary; there is so much to know that we could study forever and still feel unqualified to begin to perform. I believe that we can enhance discourse, experimentation, and creative work in this field by embracing the inevitability of errors and inaccuracies, acknowledging our own limitations and striving for full transparency, in the knowledge that this will expose our mistakes to people more expert than ourselves.

The video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPB0J9wrN4w

Filmed, recorded and edited by Christopher McDonnell
Barbitos lyre reimagined and built by Luthieros

Notes on the text and translations:

Language: Koine Greek, using ‘learned pronunciation’, with guidance from Armand D’Angour.

‘Invocation of the Muse’

ἄἒιδε Μοῦσά μοι φίλη,
μολπῆς δ’ ἐμῆς κατάρχου,
αὔρη δὲ σῶν ἀπ’ ἀλσέων
ἐμὰς φρένας δονείτω.

Sing for me, dear Muse,
begin my tuneful strain;
a breeze blow from your groves to stir my listless brain.

Text reproduced from Pöhlmann and West, 2001: 93.
Translation reproduced from West, 1992: 302.

‘Invocation of Calliope and Apollo’

Καλλιόπεια σοφά,
Μουσῶν προκαθαγέτι τερπνῶν,
καὶ σοφὲ μυστοδότα,
Λατοῦς γόνε, Δήλιε Παιάν,
εὐμενεῖς πάρεστέ μοι.

Skilful Calliope,
leader of the delightsome Muses,
and skilful instructor,
son of Leto, Delian and Paian,
favour and be with me.

Text reproduced from Pöhlmann and West, 2001: 95.
Translation reproduced from West, 1992: 303.

Musical form and text combination:

These two pieces of music (DAGM 24 and 25) are often paired, in editions of the texts as well as in musical performances. My decision to do the same is very much an aesthetic one—I enjoy the contrast between the two short pieces, so have used them as contrasting sections here. This ABA form is not (knowingly) based on any evidence from surviving ancient Greek sources.

Tuning and temperament:

I tune my lyre by ear in cycles of pure fourths and fifths. I never use electronic devices, so cannot claim to be perfectly accurate, because I prefer to follow what I think is a practically plausible ancient tuning process, rather than striving for an abstracted ‘perfect’ end result. Thus, relative pitches of the strings in this video are CDEFGABCD (the absolute pitch is roughly a semitone lower) in the so-called ‘Pythagorean’ tuning (with one slight adjustment, described below). This tuning allows me to play the two pieces, both of which are in a Greek equivalent of the modern E-mode, on the middle strings of the instrument, which are currently the most resonant and have the least pitch-drift. Adding some different strings will of course change this, so future versions of the piece will evolve as the instrument—itself a provisional and experimental reconstruction—evolves. The tuning also allows me to play other pieces on the same instrument, in the same concert, without retuning. I have slightly tempered the fourth string of the lyre (relative F; the second degree of the mode) because I use it to harmonise a melody note with a third, between the F and A strings, and prefer that third to sound as pure as possible, at least to my ear. The A must remain a perfect fourth above the E because those two strings are frequently played in quick succession, resonating together, whereas the tuning of the F string is more flexible, since the note largely functions as a passing note, which I try to damp. In future projects I intend to develop and refine my approach to tuning by incorporating incrementally more evidence from Greek sources, and drawing on the interpretations and commentaries published by David Creese, Stefan Hagel and Andrew Barker (among others), though always finding practical, aural solutions to the problems that the interpretation of ancient sources poses. However, my approach will always be predominantly intuitive—I will find out what I can do with my ears, and cross-check it against theoretical sources and modern scholarship on harmonics. The physical process of tuning and hearing is paramount.

Melody:

Both melodies are sung as transcribed in Pöhlmann and West, 2001, from ancient manuscripts. West states that transcription of relative G sharps in the ‘Invocation of the Muse’ is not certain (West, 1992: 302). I have retained them here very simply because I find them beautiful and, in the absence of a musicological consensus on the issue, I am happy to make an aesthetic choice. Pöhlmann and West provide detailed commentary on the transcription of the melody, the notation, and manuscript transmissions.

Lyre accompaniment

The lyre accompaniment is newly composed and provides a counterpoint to the melody, derived from the notated melody itself and the resonant intervals used in the tuning cycle described above. It makes intuitive sense to me to imagine that strings which were habitually sounded together by musicians while tuning their instruments would have found their way into musical accompaniments, whether they were realised in harmony with voices, strummed, or played as plucked consonant dyads. The instrumental introduction adapts the part of the notated melody, because I prefer to base original musical material on the most historically proximate models. I have added passing notes to provide a simple counterpoint, decorating long syllables in the melody and extending instrumental phrases between vocal lines. These extensions create slight pauses in the vocal melody, which diverge a little from the metre, if it is realised in a strictly additive manner. I am of course totally unqualified to adopt a position on the performance of Greek metres, but there does not seem to be a strong enough consensus that the performance of song in this period would have adhered to a perfectly additive metrical realisation, entirely without rubato or occasional insertion of extra beats, to persuade me to be bound by such a scheme. I also need to breathe, and the additional beats between lines provide exactly the amount of time I need to take a properly supported breath! As a final note on the accompaniment, I must add that my decision to play the lyre with my fingers, rather than with a plectrum, is a practical one. Iconographic and literary sources attest to the widespread use of plectra, but there is also evidence that strings were additionally plucked with the fingers (for an overview see West, 1992: 64–70). In this arrangement, I prefer the mellow sound of plucked strings, and enjoy the way in which they blend with my voice, facilitating a relatively soft, intimate sound, which matches the introspective quality I perceive in the text. However, depictions of lyre players in ancient Greek iconography almost always show them playing with plectra, damping strings with the other hand, so I acknowledge that I have, in this instance, allowed artistic preferences to lead me stray from the evidence.

General comments

I recorded a version of this ‘composite’ song for the forthcoming Delphian CD ‘Apollo and Dionysus’, which is part of the European Music Archaeology Project series. I will update this post with a link as soon as the CD is released. A remix of the same recording by Professor Chill (Rupert Till) is out now on the CD ‘Dub Archaeology’, available on Twin Records. The main difference between these tracks and the video posted here is that they are sung in ‘popular’ rather than ‘learned’ Koine Greek pronunciation. I switched phonology on the advice of Armand D’Angour, but would welcome further discussion on this subject with those in the know!

This is the first short commentary I have provided for an experimental Early Music performance and I am struck by the frequency with which my pursuit of openness forces me to confess to subjective decision-making and the intervention of practical limitations. I wonder how this would compare with commentaries by other Early Music performers, if such things were more regularly offered. Of course this is an output I have produced at an early stage in my study of ancient Greek music and my approach will no doubt develop as my knowledge of the sources, and the work of those who devote their careers to interpreting them, becomes more thorough. I hope that this first attempt to produce a transparent commentary will be of interest to like-minded listeners as well as to my fellow performers and scholars of ancient music. With some trepidation, I welcome constructive critique concerning any aspect of this performance.

Bibliography:

Barker, A (1989): Greek Musical Writings: vol. 2, Harmonic and Acoustic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
DAGM = Pöhlmann, E. and West, M. L (2001) Documents of Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hagel, S. (2009): Ancient Greek Music. A New Technical History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
West, M. L. (1992) Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.