The Music of Pindar's "Golden Lyre"

Abstract

AMONG the major losses inflicted by the passage of time we must count the disappearance of the music which formed an essential part of the art of the Greek lyric and dramatic writers. Of the tragedians' music there remains only a pitiably mutilated scrap of a chorus from the Orestes of Euripides; whether we possess a genuine specimen of the music of the lyric poets or merely an audacious forgery is the problem discussed in this article. In 1650, on page 541 of Volume I of his Musurgia universalis,l Athanasius Kircher, a learned and well-known Jesuit, published a text of the first few lines of Pindar's first Pythian ode with suprascript Greek musical signs; on page 542 both the text and the signs were reprinted underneath a line for line transcription into modern musical notation. The authenticity of this musical fragment has, at various times during the last three centuries, been blindly accepted, attacked, defended, or silently rejected; but no unanimously agreed conclusion has been reached.2 The question has recently been reopened with vigor by A. Rome for the prosecution3 and by Paul Friedlander4 for the defense; both writers draw attention to points of fresh interest but neither, I think, takes all the pertinent factors into full consideration. The problem is somewhat intricate and can be properly studied only if we take the evidence point by point in a judicial and unbiased spirit. As a necessary preliminary to the discussion, readers may care to inspect the following copy of Kircher's text and melody: 1 Athanasii Kircheri, Musurgia untiversalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni in X libros digesta (2 vols.; Romae: Corbelletti, 1650); pp. 690 +462. 2 E.g., the fragment is included by Curt Sachs in his Musik des Altertums (Breslau: Jedermanns Biucherei, 1924), and by M. Emmanuel in his article on Greek music in Lavignac's Encyclope'die de la musique (Paris, 1924); but it is not to be found in von Jan's Musici scriptores Graeci (Leipzig, 1895), or in his Supplementum (1899), or in Th. Reinach's La musique grecque (Paris: Collection Payot, 1926). 3L'origine de la pr6tendue m6lodie de Pindare, Les etudes classiques, I (1932), 3-11. 4Die Melodie zu Pindars erstem pythischen Gedicht, Berichte iuber die Verh. d. Sdchs. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Leipzig, phil.-hist. Kl., Band LXXXVI, Heft 4 (Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1934). Pp. 54. [CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY, XXXI, April, 19361 120