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THE GREEK HYMNS
By JAMES M. MATTHEWS (Ballot College, Oxford)
MR. MARTIN COOPER'S review in the Spectator of April 15th of the concert of Greek music given at Morley College on April 6th by Miss Arda Mandikian was so magically in sympathy with the music and with the ideas which gave rise to the concert that it is scarcely possible to touch again on any aspect of Greek music without to some extent echoing his words. But it is because any such re-echo would still preserve the ring of an authentic and important musical experience, and will in time reverberate far and wide, that I feel justified in corroborating Mr. Cooper's words from my own experience, having been closely connected with the concert of April 6th from its inception, from a time, in fact, when it was scarcely the germ of an idea.
Some two years ago, when the few surviving examples of ancient Greek music still seemed to those who had examined them a rather disappointing revelation of the art which Plato and Aristotle rated so uncompromisingly high, three of us—the other two were Miss Mandikian and Alan Collingridge, of Morley College, who like myself was serving in the Army—were in Athens attempting to discover the elusive secret of the six hymns. The exact problem which had to be solved was simple to define but formidable in its scale. From one point of view all that needed to be done was to perform the hymns in such a way that they were musically coherent and con- vincing ; and this was relatively simple, because we had examined the various published texts of the hymns and found that there was virtually no important disagreement between scholars over the actual notes to be sung. But simply to have done this would not have been enough, for the crux of the problem lay in the fact that we actually knew what effect the music had on the Greeks who heard it.2,000 years ago. We knew that it moved them so profoundly and occupied so dominant a place in their lives that they named the son of. Zeus himself, the god Apollo, its supreme exponent and guardian, built temples in his honour and invoked him at almost every festival and ceremony of their community ; and, further, that their philo- sophers considered its ethical influence so powerful that they said it should play a vital part in the education of every child, and, with this in view, laid down certain styles of composition which should be adhered to, forbidding some, our own major scale included, and advocating others. All this we knew to have been the effect of a single slim line of melody such as the First Delphic Hymn of 138 B.c., the text of which we held in our hands ; and we could not consider the problem of the music finally solved until it could be performed in such a way that it would have the same kind of effect on those who heard it as it did on the Greeks.
It was the unfamiliarity of the demand made by the problem which was its major difficulty. It challenged with unprecedented force one of the weakest spots in the musical tradition of Western Europe.
Its very simplicity made it formidable, for it concerned nothing more than the performance of a single unaccompanied melody. What had to be done was quite precise ; it was to find a manner of per- . forming this melody such that it would satisfy the claim which the Greeks made for their music. But the claim was an overwhelming one ; there has never been such a claim made for any music, let alone for one which employed the irreducible minimum of musical resources. In terms of our own tradition it seemed almost absurdly exaggerated. To speak of the music of our tradition as being above all an ethical influence and a first essential for the moral and spiritual development of a child would sound to modern ears as unreasonable and superstitious as a proposal to carve Byrd's "Non nobis " canon on the walls of the Bank of England as the Athenians carved the First Delphic Hymn on the walls of their Treasury at Delphi. Yet the claim had been made, and with certainty and, positiveness. There was no practical alternative but to accept it as being fully justified and to readjust our ingrained attitude to melodic music so as to accord with it.
In this respect our own education in the musical tradition of Western Europe was particularly ill-suited to give us much guidance or to suggest to us that virtually all that was needed was a close and thorough examination of melody. Experiment for six hundred years in the vast complexities of harmony and polyphony has taken place in Europe almost entirely at the expense of the study of melody, and has left Western Europeans with only the poorest of equipment for the understanding of melodic music. Indeed, it became clear to us after a very short time that our musical education was being far more of a hindrance than a help in approaching the ancient hymns, partly because it encouraged us to look for charac- teristics in the music which were not there—harmonies, counter- point, major and minor keys, sonata or symphonic form, the " tempered " scale—and partly because it had accustomed us to think musically in terms of the church and the concert-hall rather than the temple, the amphitheatre, the fiery sun and the wind. The effort of unlearning these habits of thinking about music was quite out of proportion to the actual effort of entering into the heart of the ancient hymns ; and the awkward process of retracing our steps back through centuries of musical history was perhaps only made worth while by the certain promise of vital discoveries in the end.
However, badly equipped by our training as we were to under- take a ruthless analysis of melodic music, we were not entirely without help, for all around us and every day within our sight were examples of the very principles we were trying to discover. We lived and worked within sight of the Acropolis against its back- ground of Salamis and the sea ; and everywhere round us could be found reminiscences of the intense atmosphere of Greek life—a performance of a Greek tragedy, an ancient site within reach of Athens, Greek vases and paintings and, perhaps most of all, the heat and the sunshine, with their almost intoxicating effect on body and brain. In all this the secret of Greek melody was implicit. It may have been in the Parthenon, above all, that the answer was made most vivid, partly because in the Parthenon the whole of the finality and fullness of Greek life seemed to us to find its most intense expression and partly because we had learnt, from a book by the American Jay Hambidge, that the geometrical proportions of" the Parthenon were so simple that the entire temple could have been built using only a postcard for its measurements.
This fact epitomised for us the profound simplicity which is characteristic of everything which the Greeks touched. It was the key to a civilisation which had reached its point of fulfilment, where there was no groping for a faith because religion and life were wholly identified, and no search for an artificial stimulus to strength because the earth itself was seen as the source of all strength and life. It was inconceivable that a people for whom the Parthenon represented everything they believed in should have wanted a music any more complicated or ornamental than the ancient hymns. Indeed, no music could have precisely satisfied their needs which did not achieve just that combination of, at the same time, the richest complexity and the utmost simplicity, which is only made possible by the fullest exploitation of all the resources of melody.
But one more problem remained. We had decided why it was that the Greeks possessed the kind of music they did and what place it had in their tradition, but we had not yet discovered what was the quality of the musical experience which they got from hearing it. A journey to Delphi provided an answer to this and, with it, a supreme and indelible experience. The problem at this point was nothing less than the re-creation of a people ; but it was not as difficult as it seemed. The site of Delphi, nestling in the shoulder of the huge mountain mass of Parnassos, where the gods lived as surely as we breathed, is as close to the spirit of the Greeks today as the sun which burns down on it and the warm scents which drift up from the deep valley below. The amphitheatre, though tufts of grass grew in between the stones, might have been packed with people. And by the time the hymns were sung there was no longer any difficulty to be resolved. An inward desire had grown to which such a music could be the only answer ; and the fact that it war an exacting music and made no concessions to the listener was to be welcomed ; for concessions were at such a moment wanted least of all things:
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