Strings Attached

Music Lesson, c. 460 BC, obvious courtesy of hellenica.de.

Now, I'm sure that most anyone interested in an instrument like the lyre has a general idea of how stringed instruments work, but just in case, let's dissect this baby.

Because there is no variation in distance between the bridge and (for lack of a better word) the yoke, the strings are all the same length on a Greek lyre. Perhaps you'll see what I mean when you compare the above depiction of the twin Greek lyres with this picture of an Iraqi lyre. See how the yoke is far from perpendicular to the crossbars?

There are two methods of attaining pitch on a stringed instrument (providing all strings are the same material) - the length of the string, and the tension on the string. Because all of the strings on Greek lyres were the same length, (in contrast with the aforementioned Iraqi lyre and most modern lyres), any pitch difference had to be attained by string tension. Essentially, the tighter the string is, the less the string will allow for vibration, and the tighter that vibration will be. Quite cleverly, most of my sources believe that the strings, after being affixed to a tuning peg, were wrapped with a wet, sticky hide (from the necks of oxen and sheep), making the strings much easier to tune, as they only required a slight rotation (again, straining the tension on the strings a bit more).

Thanks once again to World Archaeology

I'd be willing to bet that no musician could go two consecutive songs without another tuning; even modern strings go out of tune frequently, and animal matter has a tendency to stretch quite a bit! One has to wonder how long lyres lasted if the catgut was consistently being more and more embedded into the yoke. Perhaps the strings were replaceable, if the musician was fully prepared to deal with the sticky mess of unraveling the fat-laced tuners.



According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Arts, Sciences, and General Literature), there is a controversy regarding the number of strings the ancient Greek lyre had. While Diodorus believed that Hermes originally made his lyre with three strings (with ascending pitches), Macrobius thought that Mercury's lyre had 4 ascending strings, one for every season. Lucid and Ovid (bless you, google translator!) say that the original lyre had seven strings, but then we get this fruity little paragraph from Plutarch:

"When Phrynis added two strings to the seven-stringed lyre, the Ephors inquired whether he preferred to let them cut out the two upper or the two lower strings; 1 but in our case it is both the upper and the lower that require lopping off if we are to be brought to the state which is a mean between excess in either direction; and one of the first results of progress is an abatement of the excess and keenness of our emotions,"

So are we to assume that there were 9 strings after Phrynis' lyre? And if so, why is it near-impossible to find an ancient depiction of a 9-stringed lyre?

There are scholars who genuinely argue about such things; I see no reason why, for the same reason we have differently-numbered strings on banjos, there were different lyres with a different number of strings. Whether or not there were specific string numbers attributed to specific city states or regions may be something for a future entry.. We'll see how much I can dig up.



Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Arts Sciences and General Literature
Volume 13, Issue 2

Diodorus Siculus: Library of History, Volume II, Books 2.35-4.58, Diodorus (Loeb Classical Library No. 303) (v. 2)

The Heroïdes: or, Epistles of the Heroines. The armours, Art of love, Remedy. Ovid, Ep 3, p. 27

Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1927. 1.

Reconstructing the Greek Tortoise-Shell Lyre
Author(s): Helen Roberts
Source: World Archaeology, Vol. 12, No. 3, Archaeology and Musical Instruments (Feb., 1981),
pp. 306-309

Reconstructing the Greek Lyre

The story of Hermes and the first lyre is quite descriptive, and lends itself well to the imagination. According to the myth, Hermes used a grey iron scoop to hollow out the shell of a mountain tortoise, fastened cut stalks of reed across the back, and stretched ox hide across the front (the shell is providing the back here, if you needed a reference). He then plucked the intestine-strings (I simply can't get over that) with a plectrum, or a pick. (Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 31-53) I should mention, too, that I may have been incorrect in my earlier presumption that both the strings and the hide came from the same animal, as sources are in disagreement of whether the intestines were taken from a sheep or a cow.

Knowing this, it's now apparent why we no longer have any actual Greek lyres constructed in this way - considering it was made of mostly organic matter, it's unlikely that any of them would have avoided decomposition (which is a word I love to use in reference to music).

And while that's a bit of a disappointment, I've encountered many artists' depictions of the original lyre. Some, even, attempted to construct what they believed to be an accurate recreation seven-string tortoise-shell lyre using available materials, such as local tortoise-shells (which have been, in almost all cases, either North American or British) and various strings instead of intestine.

found on tnellen.com

Thanks to http://www.billcasselman.com


Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

However, according to some scholars, these reproductions aren't necessarily accurate. There is a debate on whether the arms of the lute are, as these pictures have shown, flat. Essentially, most lyre enthusiasts believed the lyre to be able to be accurately represented in a 2-d diagram, when it is shown in a few rare 4th and 3rd Century B.C.E. Athenian vases (wherein the lyre is represented in its 3-d form) to have forward-curving arms.

For example. (found on www.VRoma.com)

Last 4 photographs Thanks to Martha Mass, Link in Bibliography


A statue of Apollo kitharoidos and musagetes, Sheepishly borrowed from Wikipedia

Now, there is some speculation as to whether or not these curved-arm depictions are errors of perspective on the Greek Artists' part (exemplified by my final source, one of the editors of the American Journal of Archaeology).. But I wonder. The Greeks are certainly not notorious for inaccurate depictions. And (I'm so sorry you don't have access to the photographs yet - I'll update this entry when I get them!) looking at the other pictures, it seems that if it is a matter of perspective, it doesn't carry into the forms of the people or the other instruments.

I think that the curved-arm theory has merit; it would be much more beneficial for a musician to have a curved-armed lyre. Providing the size of the instrument stayed the same, this would alter the distance and tension on the strings, changing the pitch to a lower, more vibrant sound (allowing the string to vibrate in the third dimension uninhibited by the boundaries of the stretcher bars), and it would later lend itself much better to the later Byzantine method of bowing the strings (again, getting the arms out of the way of the strings has its clear advantages!).

I stumbled upon one such recreation, which may help you understand the shape I'm trying to convey:

found on World Archaeology article

Oddly, this build did not match the adjacent pictures in the article in regards to the curvature, but if I may be so bold, it seems to me that this is a more insightful design.

To find out the truth, one needs only to look at the artistic recreations.. In a 2-d representation (a vase, for example), a traditionally accepted lyre turned on its side would appear to be a turtle shell with a long, thick line coming out of the side. I haven't scoured every publication on the matter, but I have yet to see anyone playing something that looks like that. Another angle to take into account is that if the lyre were flat when placed on its side, it wouldn't lend itself well to a beautiful composition and would be rather confusing as a flat shape - perhaps Ancient Greek artists skewed the perspective for the sake of the greater composition. After all, according to Edith Hamilton, Greek poets held meter and rhythm in the same (if not greater) esteem than the content of their writings.



Sources:

Reconstructing the Greek Tortoise-Shell Lyre
Author(s): Helen Roberts
Source: World Archaeology, Vol. 12, No. 3, Archaeology and Musical Instruments (Feb., 1981),
pp. 303-312

On the Shape of the Ancient Greek Lyre
Author(s): Martha Maas
Source: The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 27 (May, 1974), pp. 113-117

Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way
W. W. Norton & Company, 1930 pp. 56

(I'm now referencing what my second reference referenced - I did not find this issue)
Florence,
Regio Mus. Arch. 81947,
in Corpus vasorum antiquorum (CVA)
Italy XIII (Florence II), plates 6o no. 2, 64, and 65;
New York Met. Mus. 37-11-23, in American
Journal of Archaeology XLIII (1939), 2-4.



for Pictures:
http://www.tnellen.com
http://www.billcasselman.com

What do we know so far?

For those of you who don't already know me, my name is Catherine. I occasionally go by Mandikat. Right now, I'm a Master's student in Interdisciplinary Studies at Iowa State University.

This blog is a project designed to concisely illuminate the evolution of the Lyre, specifically in the times of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Primarily through analysis of artistic depictions, I hope to not only explore the development of the physical construction of the instrument, but also to speculate on how it possibly lent itself to music through research, synthesis, and my own meager speculation.

Now that we've gotten the introductions out of the way, let's start with what we can find upon a very, VERY cursory glance of the lyre.

Depiction of Hermes with Lyre on a Chalkiiki Coin, courtesy of
© Andrew Lang, The Homeric Hymns

According to folklore, Hermes invented the lyre by (I must say, quite creatively) stretching cow intestines on a tortoise shell. He gifted it to Apollo (from whom he had.. er.. borrowed the cow intestines), who then gave it to Orpheus, son of the King of Thrace and the muse Calliope. Orpheus learned how to play from either Apollo (who was deemed the first master of the lyre) or Linus (any one of Apollo's sons). This served Orpheus well later in life, as he used its dulcet tune to drown out the song of the sirens. There is a great deal of art illustrating this, and I intend to address them throughout the course of this blog.



It is otherwise widely accepted that the lyre was developed in Palestine around 3200 BCE (although I have yet to find out why - you'll know as soon as I do), evolving from the harp by using long upright arms instead of the single curved bow and having the strings run along a bridge instead of being directly connected to the sound box. The oldest depiction of the lyre is Sumarian, dating back to about 2800 BCE. As I said before, although the lyre has undergone a rather drastic evolution (it certainly had time to do so!), ultimately developing a fingerboard and being played with a bow, my focus will be on how the lyre developed within ancient Greek and Roman times.



For more information (and my sources for this entry)

http://www.mid-east.com/Info/lyres.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/353012/lyre
http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/hsc02b.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16338/16338-h/16338-h.htm