His????, Aristoxenus, a generation later, took his thoughts and, ignoring almost all other areas of philosophy except music, came up with 'Elements of Harmonics' and 'Elements of Rhythm'. One of his principal theories was that the soul is to the body what harmony is to the musical instrument. He also moved away from the ideas of his former teachers, the Pythagoreans, by saying that you shouldn't work out notes of a scale by mathematical ratio alone, but also by ear.
Aristoxenus' dates are not known, exacdy, but presuming, as most do, that he was dead and curried by, at the latest, 300??, then what we are left with is what Greek scholars call 'megalos trypa aimatodis1, or, to translate, a bloody big gap. Nothing much happened until around 50??.
GETTING ORGANIZED
' I?? be fair, 'The Bloody Big Gap of 300??' - as it's known in our 1 house - did contain the early stirrings of the organ. At some stage m this period, some clever sausage decided that the aulos, or pipe, had???- fatal flaw and that was the aulos players. They were always miming out of breath. So, a 'pumped aulos' was born, on much the name principle as the uilleann pipes, where a player would squeeze an air bladder with one arm, while playing the pipes with both hands. Then, in the third century??, an engineer called Ctesibus, working in Alexandria, was said to have gone one step further with the 'organon hydraulikon' or water aulos, which used air compressed by the weight of water. Came complete with galoshes.
Ctesibus was the son of a barber and very popular with the emperors of Rome. As an engineer, he had worked on the restoration of the aqueducts. In fact, he had even designed machines of war for the emperor, intended to inflict maximum pain on those with whom they came into contact. So I suppose it was only natural that he turn his hand to the organ.
It was probably he who more or less invented it. Contemporaneous accounts tefl of his 'mechanike syntaxii, a pan pipe 'which is played with the hands and is known as the hydraulis' in which 'the wind mechanism forces the air into a pnigeus of brass placed in the water'. Got that? I think it's basically saying that he almost certainly developed the first organ, of sorts, and with it, presumably the first bandy-legged musician, with slighuy staring eyes, a somewhat mad smile and a tendency to invade your personal space. Or should I say, 'the organist'.
The organ was to prove a big hit at Delphi in 90?? when Antipatros won a big competition playing it. It was followed by the next big thing, some forty years later, just as Gaius Julius Caesar and Pompey were fighting it out for the laurel wreath, namely the oboe. In fact, although he is now almost always considered first and foremost a violinist, the Emperor Nero was almost certainly an oboe player. Sadly, when I think of the words 'Emperor Nero' now, I immediately see 'Emperor Christopher Biggins', swimming in a not-quite-voluminous enough toga in front of a set that's only just this side of shaky. I, Claudius has a lot to answer for.
Skipping blithely over the fact that the Chinese reordered their octave into sixty parts in 38?? - quite how or why, I've no idea - we get to another megalos trypa aimatodis. Although, in this instance, I should probably say 'grandis cavus sanguineus^.
JC. AND I DON'T MEAN BACH
T
his was ajrmndis cavus sanguineuswith a difference, though. This was a grandis cavus sanguineus ETCHRISTIANUS. Of course! AD is all the rage, now, and absolutely everybody is accessorizing with a fish. Music would prove useful in spreading what was at first no more than a sect. Statement and response psalms were a fantastic tool in the spread of Christianity, as was the soon-to-be-ubiquitous 'hymn'. Saints Augustine and Jerome were quick to see the benefit of being able to keep a message at the front of the mind with a catchy tune, although they did, at the same time, worry about the 'sensual pleasure' that the music gave and whether there was damage being done. Because of the essentially 'word of mouth' nature of the medium, too, it was frequendy the case that incorrect or even deliberately false info was getting through in these hymns. This is where the first big saviour of music stepped in. He was big, he was bold, he was brash - he was Bishop, to be fair, of Milan. And he went by the seductively sexy name of…
AMBROSE!
OK, not that sexy, I admit, but still, eh? Don't shoot Melinda Messenger, as it were.
t's fair enough, really. Ambrose was, indeed, the Bishop of Milan, elected in a bizarre manner when he was thirty-five. It's said during a gathering to find a new bishop, at which Ambrose was present but not actually a contender, a child from the crowd began to chant the words: 'Ambrose… bishop… Ambrose… bishop'. Taking this as divine intervention, of course, rather than, say, just plain odd, a rather reluctant Ambrose was given the office.
I lie reason a reluctant bishop makes it into the SFI amp;UHoCM is I» i.u use his big claim to fame was not theological or liturgical, at all, Inn musical. Up to Ambrose's time, music in church was generally performed by professional chanters, who would more or less monop-? ill/i- all the best tunes. Ambrose opened up the singing to the people, wiili antiphonal chanting, which was enough to move St Augustine, lor one, to tears.
It's blown now as 'Ambrosian Chant' and is still practised today in i IK- northern part of Italy, favoured over the now almost wall-to-wall t iugorian chant (after Pope Gregory IX - more on him in a minute). To put it into context, this was around the time that the Roman legions started the mass exodus from the inclement little outpost they i.illcd Britain - something to do with muttered complaints of 'It's,i I ways raining…' and 'You can't get a good latte…'.
Ambrosian chant, Gregorian chant - it all comes under the banner headline 'plainsong': generally sung by monks in monasteries, on one note, with occasional organ accompaniment. I always think it is an unfortunate phrase because it's often far from 'plain' at all. It's beautiful stuff.
This whole period of Ambrose and Gregory is, to be fair, considered by many to be more or less the start of classical music, as we know it today, mainly because it is the first period where we really got anything like a sizeable chunk of the stuff written down. Of course, as we've seen, there had been music around long, long before this. The Sumerians playing from their wedge-shaped tablets, the Greeks on their aulos, and even the Egyptians on their flutes. See? Clever chaps, the Egyptians - even had James Galway before everyone else.
NON UNUS BOTULUS
ut then, quite suddenly and dramatically, and, it's got to be said, swholly without warning…nothing happened. In fact, immediately after this, it happened again. Nothing, I mean. To be fair, it went on happening for a good two centuries.
Nothing. Happening for two whole centuries! If you want to get any idea what that must have been like, try ringing a computer helpline. All the while, though, the world just kept on turning. Just. The years fairly creaked by. Turn ti turn.
In fact, before you knew it, it was already, ooh, later the same afternoon.
Eventually, though, the last Roman out of Britain had said '?????? ridensunf and now turned off the light, a rather angry young man name of Attila the Hun came and went, and the Ostrogoth navy, now split from the Visigoths, was defeated by the Byzantines.