Suggested by the very remarkable interest taken in the music in the
works of the ancient Greek philosophers, our attempt—a semiotic attempt—would
succeed in getting us closer to the meaning of what is called "the ethos of
music" in the civilization of ancient Greeks.
The model of semiosis allows us the investigation of the ‘sign’:
music, in its structure, in its act and its functionality which means communication
and signification. Thus we can identify ‘the music-sign’ through the expression
of the sense—the sense that "is conceived as an evidence, as the feeling of
comprehension, in a very natural way" (1)—and
through the significance. Thus, our guidance implies ‘sign’,
‘expression’, ‘signification’—the triad that brings together the
coordinates of semiosis; defined, it, by Charles S.Peirce through the cooperation
of the sign, its object and its interpretant (2) and by
U.Eco: "the process through which the empirical individuals communicate and the
processes of communication become possible thanks to the systems of significance" (3).
This semiosis is put in evidence by different semiotic models: the "semiotic
triangle" proposed by Ch.K.Ogden and I.A.Richards, continuing in some way the
Aristotelian and the Augustinian representation about the treble nature of the verbal
sign; "the semiotic trapezium" of K.Heger and K.Baldinger (4);
"the hexade" stated by R.Jakobson in connection with the poetic function in
language (5), the hexamenous model of the "pedagogic
situation" in Olivier Clouzot’s conception (6),
model turned to account in Romanian semiotics by Petru Ioan in the form of "hexad of
the ‘semiotic situation’" (7).
The semiosis ‘music-ethos’ at the ancient Greeks
appears in its totality—we shall see—by the approaching of the
‘sign-function’ at the level of main components of music (modes, rhythms,
genres, sonorous registers, the instruments utilized) and, therefore by the integrative
signification of music. The semiotic analysis—through the valences of the theoretical
configuration of the structure on which a conception is based, offers the possibility of
(re)building the musical cultural fact in the horizon of the communication (in a
larger sense, exchange of message in the act of transmission - reception), beyond which a
system of signification is established (the developed significations proving to be
in correspondence with an ensemble of ethical values); so, the
‘ethos-music’—at the ground of communication and significance—reason
for a well-known truth by the semioticians, that is: "all that can be connected to
the human society or thinking can not exist without considering the human attitude of
significating and communicating"(8).
We take, here, the art of music as a sign-object, as a sensitive
representation with many values: normative, attitudinal, behaviourist, which ought to be
understood by deciphering the profound senses for a certain ethos: the ethos of the
Greek spiritual structure, communicated through music.
From the very beginning, an observation should be made (with openings
for the incredible semantic force of the art of music) about the term that, later, it will
be named after it: name, ‘significant’, for a universe of discourse,
‘reference’, initially the Greek mousike (mousikh)
meant "art of Muses" often used by Plato in his dialogues, in relationship with
philosophy considered to be "megiste mousike" ("the supreme music").
Also, we should underline a general note for the conception originated
in ancient Greece, note put into the spotlight at the semantic-pragmatic dimension,
regarding the mysterious power of music over human beings and its utilization from a moral
point of view, that is: the distinction made by the antique Greeks—at the level of
the receiver / listener subject—between two phases, stages of ‘subjective
intension’ (as we might call them) determined by the musical reality: the first one
being passive, when the listener feels the pleasure of music and gets into a special
spiritual disposition, and the second, an active one, producing a more or less immediate
effect on the listener’s will. Hence the classification of the genres and styles that
Th.Gerold (9) is referring to, a universal composition can
have as a moral consequence: an increase of the energy, of an active force ("ethos
praktikon"), an ensuring of the soul’s stability and fermity ("ethos
ethicon"), a weakening of the moral balance ("ethos malakon") or an extatic
state of being ("ethos enthousiastikon"). So, the musical modes were
composed implying an ethos, a depressed, a calm, or an enthousiastic one - here, a
transposition in the ‘semiotic model’ of a subjective ‘signification’
/ ‘intension’ pole, connotation, behaviourist answer, tendency of action.
Actually, there is an interesting correspondence between every musical mode and its
emotional force, expressed by the critics: the Dorian, virile and warlike; the Hypodorian,
majestic and stable; the Mixolidian, pathetic and sad; the Frigian, agitated and bachical;
the Hypofrigian, active; the Lidian, funeral; the Hypolidian debauched and voluptuous (10).
Among them, the Dorian mode—virile, grave, stately, warlike, instructive,
severe, keeping the soul well-balanced—was considered the national mode; it is
the mode which is suited for the perfect citizen, the mode so much eulogized by Plato in The
Republic and by Aristotle in Politics.
The music-ethos semiosis can be deduced from the
Pythagoreans’ conception. For them, the whole universe is harmony; such as the
movements of the celestial bodies those of the human soul are regulated through the
numbers’ musical relations. Granted only to the first four numbers (1, 2, 3, 4; whose
sum is 10, symbol of universal life, of the macrocosm)—the tetractys / tetrakiV —a unique miraculous universal power, Pythagora
made up the scale that bears his name, in which the melody is generated only by the
rolling of these numbers, the relations expressed by them being absolute and perfect
consonances. Pythagora’s name is also related to the famous "music of
spheres" that will accompany the movement of the eight celestial spheres and there
are his disciples who created that myth of music of spheres, supposing that the rigorous
order that chairs the sounds’ linking reflects a superior order, according to which
the celestial bodies are supposed to move and explaining thus the enigmatically influence
of music upon the human soul. One of disciples, Archytas saw in the musical language the
most substantial proof of the numerical essence of the universe. Generalizing the
mathematical and acoustic aspect of music, the Pythagoreanism saw in the art of sounds the
image of number, which is considered to be the essence of the universe. The universal
harmony was transposed in the term kosmos, and the natural order would contain
moral and rational senses through "harmony-kosmos", a "binding" that
would join together in a whole "the sky and the earth, the gods and the people",
made up by agreement and good order, by wisdom and spirit of justice.(11)
The Pythagoreans—as later, Plato and Aristotle—attributed
moral force not only to the "modes", but also to the musical rhythms. At the
syntactical level, in our analysis besides the singsong we ought to take into account the
rhythmsong—the including in the work of the fundamental rhythmic elements: lengths,
beats, bars, parts, etc. Aristoxene has the merit of having distinguished the main notions
of rhythm. Discerning between the equal genre (the report is 1/1)—calm and resolute;
the double genre (2/1)—vivid and loose; the sesquialter (3/2)—feverish and
enthusiastic, we can talk, at the semantic and the pragmatic level, about an ethos of
rhythms. "The Greeks’ sensitiveness seems to have been accessible in a
particular way to the finest impressions of the rhythm and the melody; they didn’t
find here only sensual pleasure, infinitely varied, but also a strong moral emotion that
sometimes incited the soul and intensified it and sometimes brought it quietens and
equilibrium" (12). Anyway, we learn this idea from
Aristotle in Politics. "The rhythms—he writes—vary in the same way
as the modes do: some smooth the soul, the others shake it; and the movement of the latter
may be either more vulgar or of a better taste" (13).
There it is configured an authentic theory of a musical ethos that
develops thanks to the other participants in the process of creating this art. For
instance, the instruments utilized here stimulate senses and significations with an
ethic resonance. Two were the main instruments in the Ancient Greece: the lyre (sometimes,
the cythara), Apollo’s instrument, organ of ethos; and the aulos (a flute), belonging
to Dionyssos’s cult, organ of pathos. This distinction of senses is in concordance
with the main modes—the Dorian and the Frigian—as we can learn from the IIIrd
Book of Plato’s The Republic. In his turn, the exegete William Fleming,
referring to this separation, remarked: "For the Athenians, this means a separation
between their aspirations and ideals—an instrument with that musical mode (the
Dorian, our note) implied clearness, restraint, moderation; the other one incited the
senses and stirred the passions" (14). About the
utilisation of the instruments in correlation with the moral power that is exerted upon
the man, Plato formulate a series of exigencies when reminding the mythical competition
between Apollo and Marsyas—the former playing the lyre and the latter the
flute—ended with Apollo’s victory, this event making the author of The
Republic reject all the instruments resembling the flute as belonging to "a
Dionysiac zone" of music; these instruments—in his opinion—would be the
ones which those states (of soul) that must be avoided, could be expressed with, namely
the intensely love states that could provoke "the coming out of oneself" (the
ekstasis) of the listener. Interpreting Aristotle’s texts, we can notice the same
principles (in the Classic period), principles that are to be paid attention at especially
when choosing the modes, the rhythms and the instruments. Anyway the message is clear:
"Among these refinements of art we must take only what is necessary to feel all the
beauty of the rhythms and of the songs and to have a more complex sensation concerning the
music than this physical excitement which even the animals feel as well as the slaves and
the children;./…/ The flute must be eliminated. /…/ It is not a moral
instrument; its role is only to stir the passions" [13: 203].
The semiotic scheme also facilitates the maintaining of an ethos of registers,
through the significations (ethis qualities) granted to the three regions of pitches:
acute, grave and medium. This way, we can understand Ptolemaios’s observations:
"the same melody has an active effect in the acute scale and a depressive one in the
grave scale, because a high sound stimulates the soul, while a law sound weakens it [apud
C.Sachs, op. cit.]; as well as the distinction attributed to Aristide the Quintilian: the
distinction between grave, medium and high, that would oppose three genres of melodies: hypatoid,
mesoid and netoid, that would coincide with the three tropoi: tragic,
dithyrambic, nomic; in a certain way a resembling observation had made Aristotle in About
soul.
As for the musical genres, through the significance of ethos, we
notice a predilection of antique Greeks for diatonic, "virile" and
"austere", as Plato characterises it in his dialogue Protagoras. But,
gradually, the enharmonic and chromatic genres have been admitted (as in the cases of
modes, of instruments, etc. that have increased and perfectioned). These ones, the
enharmonic and chromatic genres have invaded the singsong "with its caresses and its
anguishes, its murmurs and its burst of tears"[12: 155].
The real understanding of the music-ethos semiosis at the ancient
Greeks can not be reached without taking into consideration the semantic openings of their
conception on kalokagathia / kalokagaqia—identity
of beauty and good under the sign of harmony, as an ideal of luminosity, of symmetry, of
equilibrium, of order. In The Banquet, the authentically music, the one necessary
for the free people, is defined as an expression of a purified love, respectively, of a
man’s bents to virtue, to beauty, being called even "science of the elements of
love". Plato conceived its characteristics—the rhythmic singularity, the
symmetry of phrases, the harmonious character of the general sonorousness, the absence of
the dissonances, of the violent accents and of the frantic movements—as the
expression of human’s dignity and superiority as a rational being.
Persuasive capacity for what we have called "the ethos of
music" in ancient Greek civilisation have the famous theories: the theory of
imitation (mimesis / mimhsiV ) and that of
purification (catharsis / kaqarsiV ) by means of
music, upon which insisted Heraclit of Ephes, Democrit (who seems to have written About
rhythms and harmony), Plato (in the dialogues The Banquet, The Republic, The Laws)
and, especially, Aristotle (in Poetics and Politics); also, later, Sextus
Empiricus (in Against the musicians), Plotin (in The Enneads), Porphyr,
Iamblichos, Proclus.
In this context, we will also remind of the conception regarding the
status of music in the antique Greek state, as well as that referring to the educational
force of this art. We have testimonies from the Greek thinkers, Pythagora’s
successors, who conceived music as a superior instrument of education. Damon, for
instance, "tries a complex intercorrespondance between music and the category of
politics and social within the framework of which the first, sustaining its main purpose
in ethos, ensures the rational enlightenment of the other two. Music, itself, stimulating
the principles of virtue and thus serving for some superior ideals acquires a distinct
status, different from the one it had when it accompanied the religious manifestation or
it utilised divertimento".(15)
And the characterisation of the musician—as we find it in
Plato’s dialogues—becomes a persuasive argument for our study; an argument that
directs us, again, towards the fundamental signification of the terms: ‘symbol’,
‘reference’, ‘name’ in a semiotic model; the terms of
‘music’, ‘musician’, initially close to those of philosophy and
philosopher in point of sense: "the art of Muses and the gymnastics had been
given to people especially for enthusiasm and love of wisdom than for soul and body. The
one who combines best the gymnastics with the art of Muses is by all means a perfect
musician, master of harmony" (16). And moreover:
"The harmonious soul is wise"—says the philosopher in Gorgias, and
for Laches, in the dialogue with the same title, a true man of Muses is the one capable of
creating a perfect harmony, to realise a concordance between his behaviour and his words,
with simplicity, in the Dorian mode, that is in that truly Greek harmony.(17)
It is transmitted an worthy message throughout the centuries, a message
based upon the art initially nominated through a concept (by itself ethic significant): armonia
/ armonia .
We wanted to emphasize the communication through music of an impressive
ethos, which humanity can follow as a model; and in connection with the concept of harmony
itself, a communication in concordance with the way of signification—a good
opportunity for the way in which the semiotician Ch.Morris considered
‘communication’: "the utilization of the signs for establishing the
signification’s communion". (18)
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