Old Vs. New -- 1962's "The 300 Spartans" and 2006's "300"

There have been several tributes made about the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E., including poetry, songs, television programs, and, of course, film. The films I am about to review were both rather high-budgeted for their time. I am fascinated that two stories of the same origin can have such a different tone and purpose. While "300" (directed by the maker of the gorgeous "Sin City" used the battle to employ striking visual effects (and to be, let's face it, INCREDIBLY badass), the 1962 telling was released as an allegory to encourage the different nations of the Free West to stand up to the USSR during the cold war. While "300" received criticism for being historically inaccurate, "The 300 Spartans" was released in a time where historical accuracy wasn't a priority (and why should it have been? this was before the days of wikipedia, after all).

Without further ado, here are the two trailers in question.


The 300 Spartans:




and 300:




Quite a difference indeed! I should mention, 300 is based off of Frank Miller's brilliantly made graphic novel, which was inspired by The 300 Spartans (Miller attributes his interest in Thermopylae to having seen this movie as a child). While there is a plethora to be said about both in terms of plot and execution, I will devote this entry to the music alone.

The 300 Spartans (hereafter referred to as Spartans) was scored by Manos Hadjidakis, a Greek composer who was nominated for two Tony Awards the year before this film's release.  Like Helen of Troy before it, Spartans has a rather generic instrumentation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the same studio orchestra was employed. The score within the trailer varies between a Phrygian dominant-centered melody and what I hear as a Hungarian minor with a few borrowed notes from parallel modes (perhaps to make it more aurally accessible to the 1962 listener). You will also find a rather strict Dorian melody peppered in places (I've found an excerpt of it and have placed it below)... Those triumphant horns were essentially inescapable in Hollywood films, but Manos certainly did not disappoint us in the Greek flavor of his soundtrack.



I enjoy the strong sense of modality in this score, and while it is certainly not an exact replica of any ancient Spartan war song, there is a clear hat-tip to the simple, modal, through-composed music of Ancient Greece.

The soundtrack to 300 was composed by the award-winning (but less prolific thusfar) Timothy Williams, known also for  The Watchmen and the re-release of Day of the Dead. Unfortunately, it seems as though two tracks in it were... lifted... from Goldenthal's 1999 score of Titus, and, as a result, received MUCH negative criticism. Even James Southall of Movie Wave gave the album his first-ever "no stars" rating, calling it a "despicable album; all those involved should be ashamed (not to mention prosecuted)". That link goes to the review, if you're interested -- it's quite scathing! I will not be taking this into account when critiquing (it's terribly easy to accidentally plagiarize when it comes to music; I can't be one to point fingers!), but it does explain why he hasn't gotten a Zimmer-esque number of film-score jobs since then.

300's soundtrack is, obviously, quite different in tone, orchestration, melody, and underpinnings from Spartans. There is strong use of drums, including an actual drumset (snares particularly trip me up), electric guitar, an enormous all-male choir, tubular bells, and strings. In places, it falls victim to the same orchestration folly as Spartans...  Williams had a studio orchestra, and he wasn't about to squander it by getting a small aulos/lyre ensemble to perform a thin and simple historical piece.

No, he had something utterly hardcore in mind.




It is certainly worth noting that the choral words in this score are sung both in Latin and in Greek. Each piece used in an action scene has a very heavy war-drum, unlike Spartans, which both intensifies the action and is more historically believable, as the little music that Sparta did employ (most of their music was used to train youth) revolved around drumming and marches. The melody is modal (again, Phrygian) with thick underpinnings and parallel open fifths, which were prevalent in later Greek music. It appears as though whoever *did* compose this (again, not pointing fingers) certainly did their homework.

So why, then, would a Greek composer have a less-Greek-sounding score?

If I had to guess, I would guess that anachronisms were less of an issue in early film (the information on Greek music wasn't nearly as well-circulated among the common film-goer, and there were most likely far fewer people willing to research it). Also, because the 1962 composer was Greek, I imagine that he didn't feel the need to do as much research as his later counterpart. They are both very good examples of Greek-American fusion from different times. I, for one, look forward to seeing the 2040 telling of the battle of Thermopylae.



If you were curious, here is a juxtaposition of one of the tracks in question with its alleged (heh) victim. I'll let you be the judge.

The music of 'Helen of Troy' (1959), Warner Bros

I must admit, I am a sucker for anachronisms. They've brought us such a variety of odd hybrids, ranging from Steampunk to Renaissance Festivals to Hipsters. I delight in the peculiarities of a non-consensual  blending of cultures, sometimes long after one has run its course (and could have any say in the matter). My next few entries will focus on a few examples of how films about the Ancient Greeks have let a bit of zeitgeist slip in and color the stylistic choices.. Particularly the music.

We're starting with the 111-minute long Action Adventure Drama, Helen of Troy, directed by Robert Wise in 1956. The music was done by famous Austrian composer, Max Steiner, also known for Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and The Last of the Mohicans.



Quite the epic, no doubt.

There is no doubt that the music suits the age of the film -- we could most likely replace a bit of the incidental music from The Sound of Music with the opening theme in this trailer. The instrumentation is quite entirely indicative of the 1950's -- enormous orchestras with brass instruments and large string sections...

However, around 1:04, when they begin talking about the "Legions of Imperial Greece", there is a clear melodic attempt at conveying the Greek Aura. We'll focus on that bit for now.

While, again, the instrumentation is anachronistic, the first few seconds of the melody could be convincingly Greek-sounding if re-scored. It hovers around the dominant in a Phrygian/Aolian modality, with many instruments doubling on the same part. The drum pattern isn't traditional, but it is still included (as it was reported to have appeared in Greek War Music, played on the Daouli, the Defi, and the Toumbi).

 In its entirety, it's quite apparent that the music of Helen of Troy conveys the 1950's drama much more than it captures the Greek aura. That being said, I wonder if the potency of the emotion in this film would suffer a bit if the composer had limited himself to only Greek instruments.

..Well, I doubt the drama would be lessened if he had, but I'd be willing to bet that the thickness of the orchestration made the story a bit more accessible to the masses.

In the near future, I will be focusing on more films, but I'm *very* excited about analyzing the music of more recent video games, such as God of War.

For your listening pleasure, here's a little something I stumbled upon while researching Greek War Music. I have found no evidence online or offline that we have records of these specific drum beats, but maybe they've read or heard something I haven't.

The sounds!

courtesy of musicportal.gr

It's very difficult to generalize with Greek music. There were drinking songs, work songs, love songs, wedding songs, bridal chamber songs, funeral dirges, odes for heroic warriors, and hymns for the gods. There were wild choral songs interspersed with shouting to pay tribute to the playful Dionysus, and there were simple aulos tunes to serenade the relaxing symposiasts. 

There are strangely beautiful and undoubtedly powerful choruses to enhance the emotional effects of drama and the theater, such as the Stasimon Chorus from Orestes (408 B.C.E.) here: 

And there are mysterious hymns to the gods, designed to intensify the listeners' wonder and solemnity, like this Delphic Hymn to Apollo (138 BCE).

Not only are there so many genres and purposes to these musical endeavors, but there are likely thousands of songs of which we have no record. It's terribly difficult to make generalizations about a two-thousand-year-long timespan.. Look at how much our music has evolved in the last fifty years!

In my next post, I will explore the way Greek music has been portrayed in more recent media, and give my critique, based on the similarities and differences to actual Greek music, and how the time in which it was published may have influenced its compositional elements.





In case anyone was wondering, this one is my favorite. It's from Seikilos's Epitaph, written sometime between 200BCE and 100CE.

My best sources - Visual Depictions

I've compiled a list of my best lyre-references in photos, periodicals, websites, and books (although, I must admit, I haven't read 10 full published books -- most of my information came from articles. That's good, though! Books don't necessarily have to be peer-reviewed!). I know that I've mentioned quite a few of these in my end-of-the-page bibliographies, but I'm happy to say that I now have it narrowed down.

Visual Depictions

To be honest, a larger portion of my most useful images came from vases, all taken from the same article - "On the Shape of the Roman Lyre" from The Galpin Society Journal. My apologies, but they're simply the most insightful.

These three are all from the aforementioned article:

one

two

and three.

I found this one on my computer after an information binge.. If anyone has information on its source, I'd happily take it and give credit where credit is due..

The reason why these four all made it on the list is that they (as a cohesive collection) provide what I would consider minimum amount of information necessary to allow for my (okay, fine, the) curved lyre theory.

I must say, I find the fourth picture particularly interesting.. Now that I'm in the dark as to where this picture came from or its source, the gesture is quite mysterious! Is this man defending himself with his lyre, defending his lyre, or merely engaging star power to appease his screaming (and reaching) fans? I would love to see the rest of this vase.

My favorite surviving depictions are all of Apollo.. While Apollo has been interpreted many, many ways, his lyre holds a delightful (well, delightful for me) consistency.

Depiction of a very young Apollo playing his cithara (the performance/professional version of the lyre), now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum -- the angle in this picture really helps us get a good idea of how the strings would have fallen, and how the instrument would have sounded, providing this was made of wood. (this statue was made in the 2nd century, AD), picture found here

Image of Apollo with a Cithara, thanks to Wikipedia.. I love everything about this statue!

Image of an Imperial Roman Fresco, found on www.theoi.com,

The statues, found in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum and in the Museo Nazionale Romano, respectively, and the Fresco, found in the Museo Palatino, depict a Roman Apollo playing the cithara and the lyre. Note the ever-so-slight curvature of the arms (I know I keep beating this to the ground, but I still find it most fascinating.) -- as far as I'm concerned, if they took the effort to make the body THIS anatomically correct, the shape of the lyre would have a matched accuracy. The meticulousness of the depiction of the forms speak for the creators' virtuosity.

I have a ridiculously large collection of pictures. My original plan was to make a "top 10 most useful images" list... But I think that any of the other pictures (and, I assure you, I have MANY) would be superfluous.

Here's the Skinny

Apollo and the Marsyus, Athens National Museum, CA 350-320 BC. Thanks to http://www.mlahanas.de

Well, folks,

it's been an unusually and abnormally busy week. I've contacted three ISU professors regarding the development of the Greek/Roman lyre and kithara (I know I haven't mentioned this, but my flurry of sources keep reminding me that I must mention: the kithara [or cithara] is a lyre used for performance.).

Two professors answered me (hey, not a bad number!) and one of them had a rather extensive list of places to look for speculations (I might even go out on a limb here and say educated hypotheses) on ancient music - what it sounded like, what modes they played with, and even a few recordings. I'm very excited to show these to you, as soon as I can figure out embed code.

Let me make a few generalizations, though, until I can update this entry properly.

It appears, after 7 or 8 songs picked at random, that the primary mode of the Greeks was Phrygian. It's quite possible that stochasticity simply isn't in my favor and that my random choice led to an insufficient sample. I assure you - I will be commenting at length on a more deliberate sample size as soon as I can post these songs. Feel free to listen to them in their original home by following either of the links on this paragraph.

Another issue I very much want to address in this blog are music guilds of ancient Greece and Rome. For the record, I care not to comment on this until I have completely scoured my sources, but this seems to be a subject with a lot of room for research. Thusfar, there have been almost no references or information on Musical guilds (both performers and instrument craftsmen) on the internet. Thank goodness for the library (and for online bookstores), because I have quite a few sources that give me quite a bit of hope.

Until then, though, here's a FABULOUS list of sources I've been encouraged to read. I'm hoping to have a lot of information once I get my paws on them! It appears as though I'm going to have to do a lot of work with google translate, but it's awfully exciting to have access to information that non-german speakers don't yet have!

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~timmoore/AncientMusicSelectedBibliography.html

http://www.iwu.edu/~classics/music.html

http://classics.uc.edu/music/michigan/index.html

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