First, the extent to which the Greeks identified music with poetry was greater than I had always believed. I knew, of course, that no poetry was uttered aloud without being sung, and that the names for the types of poetry (Lyric, Tragedy, Comedy, etc.) had to do with music. What I did not know, as this: "In his Poetics Aristotle, after setting forth melody, rhythm, and language as the elements of poetry, goes on to say: 'There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse. . . , but this has hitherto been without a name.'" (Donald Jay Grout & Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988, p. 7; citing Poetics 447a-b) Pretty exciting stuff. The rest of the passage alters the perception a bit, however:
For we can find no common term to apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and to the Socratic dialogues: nor again supposing a poet were to make his representation in iambics or elegiacs or any other such metre—except that people attach the word poet（maker）to the name of the metre and speak of elegiac poets and of others as epic poets. Thus they do not call them poets in virtue of their representation but apply the name indiscriminately in virtue of the metre. For if people publish medical or scientific treatises in metre the custom is to call them poets. But Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except the metre, so that it would be proper to call the one a poet and the other not a poet but a scientist. [20] Similarly if a man makes his representation by combining all the metres, as Chaeremon did when he wrote his rhapsody The Centaur, a medley of all the metres, he too should be given the name of poet. (Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23, translated by W.H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1932. From the Perseus website (www.perseus.tufts.edu).Some of this is, of course, Aristotle being Aristotle and demanding names for things which no one had thought to apply them, and part of it is his odd starting point of mimesis, which usually means "imitation" but has many meanings in Aristotle, best summed up as "representation."
So, the point isn't so much that the Greeks didn't conceive of unsung utterance as an art form, but that they named the sung ones first, and thus must have considered them special as art. I don't see this being unique to the Greeks, but I know too little about other cultures to say for sure.
The other thing which I ought to have known is mentioned in the textbook's discussion of the connection between music and ethics made by the Greeks, especially Pythagoreans.
The doctrine of ethos, of the moral qualities and effects of music, fitted into the Pythagorean view of music as a microcosm, a system of pitch and rhythm ruled by the same mathematical laws that operate in the whole of visible and invisible creation. Music, in this view, was not only a passive image of the orderly system of the universe; it was also a force that could affect the universe--hence the attribution of miracles to the legendary musicians of mythology. (ibid., last italics mine)I have never, I confess, fully understood the Pythagoreans and the many cults that came afterward and exist still in our day, cults which make a mystery out of numbers and make perfectly rational ideas occult and mysterious. If numbers explain the universe, then that is clear, and anyone who can see reality in those terms should be allowed to speak about it openly and without confusion with and by priesthoods and ceremonies; anyone who believes that they can, alone or in small groups, connect better with and maybe even control the universe is not thinking rationally at all, it seems to me. Now I understand, at least, why, beyond their basic (weird) beliefs, the Pythagoreans hooked their wagon to Orpheus in the same way most Athenians did Persephone: Orpheus was the musician, and his control of music, identified by the Greek thinkers with control of numbers, allowed him to make rocks and trees dance and to take his bride three-quarters of the way back from the underworld. (But there's the curiousness again: If he wasn't successful, since he couldn't control his own desires, why make him a center of your cult? Do you just try to ignore that part? Can you ignore the latter history, in which he swears off all women, and is eventually dismembered by female worshippers of Dionysos? I wonder if Orpheus shows up in that dreadful paper by Nietzsche about Apollo and Dionysos.)
I'm sure a little more reading on my part would shore up those things I'm uncertain of and dispel my delusions. Still, I learned something this morning, so that's something.
