Philomusica on-line, 7 2008 – 9-18
«Philomusica on-line» – Rivista del Dipartimento di Scienze musicologiche e paleografico-filologiche – e-mail:
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9
Atti del Secondo Meeting Annuale di MOIΣA.
«La musica nell’Impero romano. Testimonianze teoriche e scoperte archeologiche»
Phōnaskia for singers and orators
The care and training of the voice in the Roman empire
by Andrew Barker
University of Birmingham, UK
andrewqbarker@hotmail.com
§ Professional singers, actors and orators in the
Roman imperial period undertook specialised
types of training (φωνασκία), to preserve and
improve their voices, and doctors recommended
similar vocal exercises to promote physical health
and fitness. This paper examines some of the
evidence about the techniques that were used,
most of which does not come from writings on
music, but from rhetoricians and medical writers.
In drawing conclusions about the regime
prescribed for singers, we have to rely mainly on
the ways in which medical and rhetorical experts
describe their techniques, and the distinctions
they draw between the exercises they recommend
for orators, or for people wishing to improve their
general health, and those to which singers were
subjected, which they typically reject as excessive.
Many of the details are elusive, but although the
exercises famously undertaken by the emperor
Nero were probably more extreme than those in
common use, it is clear that the disciplines
regularly imposed on singers throughout their
careers were technically specialised and physically
demanding. Training of the laborious sort that
singers undergo, so the medical writers assert,
can seriously damage people’s health, and reduce
or even destroy their sexual potency. But though a
singer’s life evidently demanded tough physical
exertions, we are also told, paradoxically, that
they treated themselves as fragile and delicate,
adopting special diets, taking walks at regular
times of day, caring for the throat with
medications and massaging it with oil, always
doing gentle ‘warming-up’ exercises before
performing, and in general caring tenderly for
themselves and their voices, all of which earned
them the rhetoricians’ contempt.
§ Nel periodo romano, i cantanti professionisti, gli
attori e gli oratori si sottoponevano a sofisticati
allenamenti (φωνασκία) al fine di preservare e
migliorare le proprie qualità vocali. Esercizi vocali
simili a questi erano raccomandati anche dai
medici per migliorare salute e forma fisica.
Questo lavoro esamina alcune tra le testimonianze
sulle tecniche da essi utilizzate, la maggior
parte delle quali non proviene da scritti di
argomento musicale, ma da autori di retorica e di
medicina. Nel trarre conclusioni sul regime
prescritto ai cantanti dobbiamo basarci
principalmente sulle modalità con cui gli esperti
di medicina e di retorica descrivevano le proprie
tecniche, e sulle distinzioni da essi tracciate tra gli
esercizi raccomandati agli oratori e quelli
utilizzati dai cantanti, solitamente rifiutati in
quanto eccessivi. Molti dettagli sono incerti ma,
sebbene i famosi esercizi a cui si sottoponeva
l’imperatore Nerone fossero probabilmente più
estremi di quelli comunemente in uso, risulta
chiaro che le discipline imposte con regolarità ai
cantanti nel corso delle loro carriere fossero
tecnicamente specializzate e alquanto impegnative
da un punto di vista fisico. L’allenamento
laborioso al quale i cantanti si sottoponevano
poteva seriamente danneggiarne la salute e
ridurre o addirittura distruggere la loro potenza
sessuale. Tuttavia, se pur la vita di un cantante
richiedeva con tutta evidenza duri sforzi fisici,
paradossalmente ci viene anche riferito che i
cantanti trattavano se stessi come persone fragili
e delicate: essi adottavano diete speciali, facevano
passeggiate ad ore prestabilite della giornata,
avevano cura della propria gola con medicamenti
e massaggi con olio, eseguivano costantemente
esercizi di ‘riscaldamento’ prima di esibirsi e, più
in generale, avevano cura di sé e delle proprie
voci, tutte pratiche che fecero guadagnare loro il
disprezzo dei retori.
Philomusica on-line 7 (2008)
10
llusions to special disciplines involved in training the voice go back at least
to the fourth century BC. Plato, for instance, refers to the choruses who
compete in the festivals as πεφωνασκηκότες ἰσχνοί τε καὶ ἄσιτοι, «having undergone
vocal training while thin and unfed» (Leges 665e). One of the Aristotelian
Problems explains why those who do vocal training, οἱ φωνασκοῦντες, actors and
singers and others of that sort, do so in the early morning while fasting; it is
because food heats the breath, and hot breath roughens the windpipe and
damages the voice (Problemata 11, 22). But as Annie Bélis quite rightly points
out, there is no evidence for the existence of the voice-trainer as a distinct type of
professional until late Hellenistic and Roman times, when we first meet the noun
φωνασκός, phonascus in Latin, as the title for a professional of this sort.1 A certain
Theodorus wrote a treatise on the subject, admiringly described by Diogenes
Laertius (2, 103-4) as τὸ φωνασκικὸν βιβλίον πάγκαλον. Unless this Theodorus is
the rhetorician who taught the young Tiberius (Suetonius Tiberius 57), we know
nothing about him; but the fact that his work is described in these terms, as «the
excellent little book on φωνασκία» (rather than «an excellent little book…»),
suggests that Diogenes expected his readers to have heard of it, and hence that it
enjoyed some fame in the period when he was writing (probably the early third
century AD). The discipline acquired its own specialised jargon, ἀναφώνησις for a
“warming-up” exercise, for example, δενδρυάζουσα φωνή for a certain vocal timbre,
ληκυθίζειν for creating a hollow sound, διάτραμις, which seems to mean “smoothbuttocked”,
for another sort of sound, τράγος for a hoarse voice and so on.2
References to φωνασκία become very common in texts of the imperial period,
especially in writings on rhetoric and on medicine. Their evidence shows clearly
that vocal training in one form or another was now being used for at least three
different purposes, as a discipline for orators, as a discipline for singers, and more
broadly and perhaps more surprisingly, as a form of exercise conducive to general
health. Although the prescriptions about φωνασκία for orators and for general
health seem to have had much in common, experts in both these fields almost
always insisted, as we shall see, that their techniques should be sharply
distinguished from the much more specialised kind of training which singers had to
undergo, for which both the rhetorical and the medical writers express a deeprooted
contempt. In this paper I shall focus as far as possible on voice-training for
musicians, but our information about the other two contexts must not be neglected;
much of the surviving material about singers comes from the rhetoricians and
medical writers, in passages where they are trying to explain how the practices
which they recommend differ from those of the musical specialists.
Before we consider a selection of the relevant texts, there are two more
preliminaries that must be put in place. First, the discipline of φωνασκία for singers
1 BELIS (1999), p. 186.
2 See Phrynichus grammaticus Praeparatio sophistica 106; ibid. 86; Aelius Dionysius Attika onomata
s.v. δενδράζουσα φωνή; Hesychius s.v. διάτραμις, δ 1392, quoting from Strattis; Palladius Commentaria in
Hippocratis librum sextum de morbis popularibus p. 92 Dietz.
A
Andrew Barker – Phōnaskia for singers and orators
11
was entirely separate from their specifically musical training, and the trainer
needed no qualifications as a musician himself. He was concerned only with the
strengthening and maintenance of the vocal apparatus; he was more closely
analogous to a football team’s physiotherapist than to the coach who trains players
in the tactics and skills of the game itself. (This too is a point properly emphasised
by Annie Bélis).3 Secondly, even a cursory reading of the texts will make it clear
that although the word φωνασκός or phonascus does indeed refer to a voice-trainer
in some passages, it by no means always does so; and that is almost never what is
meant when people are described as φωνασκικοί or οἱ φωνασκοῦντες. These are
almost always the singers, orators or keep-fit enthusiasts themselves, the people
who undergo vocal training and not those who provide it; and so too, in a good
many texts, are the people described as φωνασκοί.
Neglect of these two points can lead to unfortunate misunderstandings. One
example which will be familiar to students of Greek musical theory arises in
connection with the passages, preserved by Porphyry, in which the writer known as
Didymus ὁ μουσικός analyses the methods of various schools of harmonic theory. In
the course of his discussion he attributes certain views and practices to people
whom he calls οἱ φωνασκικοί; and most scholars who have examined these texts
have assumed that he is referring to vocal trainers. In the past I have done so
myself.4 But for both the reasons I have given this is almost certainly wrong. It
overlooks the way in which the word φωνασκικός is typically used, and – more
conclusively – it ignores the fact that voice-trainers as such had no professional
remit in musical matters and are unlikely to have adopted any particular view
about the issues that Didymus is discussing, that is, the means by which we should
distinguish the right sizes of intervals, the correct forms of scales, and so on. The
φωνασκικοί who, according to Didymus, make these judgements purely on the basis
of non-rational habituation must be trained singers, not voice-trainers, and the
ὀργανικοί whom he mentions in the same breath must be professional players of
instruments. Read in this way the passage makes perfectly intelligible sense.
That was a small digression from the main subject of this essay, but it has at
least given me the opportunity to correct an error in one of my previous
publications. Let us move on. The best known of all ancient references to vocal
training, I suppose, must be the one in chapter 20 of Suetonius’ Life of Nero.
When Nero first got the idea of turning himself into a singer, despite his feeble
and husky voice, exiguae vocis et fuscae, he «neglected none of the things which
devotees of this kind of discipline did over and over again either to preserve the
voice or to strengthen it; these included lying on his back supporting a sheet of
lead on his chest, purging himself with enemas and vomiting, and abstaining
from harmful fruits and drinks». Here we are clearly in the realm of purely
physical techniques, designed, as Suetonius says, to preserve and strengthen the
3 BÉLIS (1999), pp. 186, 191.
4 Didymus quoted at Porphyrius In Ptolemaei Harmonica commentarium p. 26, 14 Düring; cf. BARKER
(1989), p. 242.
Philomusica on-line 7 (2008)
12
voice. They have nothing to do with music as such; but on the other hand they do
seem to be designed specifically for singers, and we hear nothing about any
comparable exertions in texts about orators. Augustus too had his phonascus who
taught him how to use his voice as a public speaker and with whom he worked
diligently; but there is no suggestion that he went in for exhausting physical
labours of the kinds that are attributed to Nero (Suetonius, Life of Augustus 84).
A good many writers, all the way up to the rhetorician Choricius in the 6th
century AD, give comparable accounts to those of Plato, the Problem-writer and
Suetonius of the strict diet that singers in training had to observe; it seems to
have been the common practice. We seem to get a very different picture from
Plutarch: «The choregoi», says his speaker, «provide little eels and salads and
garlic and bone-marrow for the choristers, and they dine splendidly over a long
period, training their voices while living in luxury» (De gloria Athenensium
349a). This seems to contradict the commoner depiction of a singer’s diet as
frugal and austere, but we may be inclined to dismiss the apparent contradiction
as illusory. Plutarch puts these words into the mouth of a Spartan. He is talking
about the Athens of classical times, not Plutarch’s own, and he is criticising the
Athenians for the extraordinary amount of effort and expense they put into the
performing arts while allegedly neglecting their army and navy. In the passage I
have quoted he is contrasting the elaborate diet dispensed to the members of an
Athenian chorus with the small and rudimentary rations given to the city’s
soldiers and sailors. It is patently a piece of tendentious rhetoric, and perhaps it
should not be taken at face value. But it is very hard to be sure. There are
passages elsewhere which also treat singers as delicate creatures who need a
specially designed diet not unlike that described by Plutarch’s Spartan.
Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 14, 623c), for instance, quotes a description by the
fourth century comic poet Clearchus of singers being fed on white eels and all
sorts of glutinous foods, since, so he says, they nourish the breath and put flesh
on the vocal apparatus (Clearchus fr. 2 Kassel-Austin). More seriously, in the
period we are concerned with here, Quintilian also says that singers and orators
need different diets; he does not say what they are, but the gist of his remarks in
the remainder of the passage is that singers live an enviably soft life by
comparison with that of an orator. He says that singers can choose regular times
of day for their health-giving walks, unlike orators who have to be ready to work
at any time of day or night; and that while orators need above all a strong and
resilient voice, what singers need is one that is flexible and delicate, and they
coddle and care for it and protect it from strain. He compares people who
cultivate beautiful voices with those who are used to exercising and being rubbed
down with oil in the gymnasium, who perform splendidly in their own special
sport but would soon give up if they had to march on military expeditions and do
guard-duties (Quintilian Institutiones oratoriae 11, 3, 23-26). Rhetoricians and
medical writers in general tend, in fact, to represent a singer’s kind of voicetraining
both as dangerously taxing and tough, and as much too sheltered and
dainty to prepare a person for serious hard work or to promote good health.
Andrew Barker – Phōnaskia for singers and orators
13
Suetonius’ reference to Nero’s sheet of lead has an interesting parallel in a
passage of Galen.5 He describes the case of a boy whose chest was underdeveloped
by comparison with the rest of his body, and the procedures he
adopted in order to improve it. It is a difficult passage, and I cannot be sure that I
have completely understood it. But at any rate the procedures included binding
the lower part of the boy’s chest and his abdomen with bandages, and telling him
to do exercises with his arms and to make sounds with his voice of the sort that
the φωνασκοί call ἀναφωνήσεις, without allowing his breath to escape; and
meanwhile Galen and his assistants pressed on the boy’s chest, preventing him
from breathing out and forcing the breath to be retained inside. (The ἀναφωνήσεις
to which Galen refers were vocalisations used by singers as warming-up exercises
before a performance, as we learn from a writer of the same period, Phrynichus
the grammarian, Praeparatio sophistica 106). A brief phrase in the passage
seems to mean that the sounds were to be made on small intakes of breath,
producing an even greater expansion of the chest; this would explain how the
boy’s ἀναφωνήσεις could be uttered without any escape of breath from his body.
These procedures will be most successful, Galen says, if the sounds are made
loudly and at a high pitch; and the person undergoing the treatment should draw
in as much breath as he can, to expand his chest to the greatest possible extent.
Presumably the treatment used on the boy was repeated many times, and if we
are to believe Galen, it worked; he recommends these procedures to anyone
wishing to improve his physique, unless he is very old, in which case he should
avoid them. We may reasonably guess that Nero, a century earlier, had to do
much the same sort of thing, with the lead sheet as a substitute for the exertions
of Galen and his assistants.
There is further evidence that voice-training involved a very harsh physical
regime in a number of other passages from the medical writers. Galen tells us, for
instance, that people who start either athletic or vocal training from too early an
age become incapable of sex, and their genitals become thin and wrinkled like
those of old men (De locis affectis p. 451 Kühn). Soranus, another doctor more or
less contemporary with Galen, gives a very similar impression of what could
happen to women. The menstrual discharge, he says, is greater in women who
lead a leisured life, and smaller in those who take part in athletics or go in for
voice-training. It can in fact stop altogether, not only because of old age, but as
the result of a woman’s engaging in φωνασκία at a professional level, φωνασκία
ἀγωνιστική, which uses up all the available matter; and in some cases the women
become completely man-like, ἀνδρώδεις (Soranus Gynaecia 1, 22, 6; ibid. 1, 23, 1).
The notion that female professional singers grew to look like the great Tamara
Press or some other stereotypical Russian woman athlete may seem bizarre, but
the comparison with atheletes is common, and passages like these are eloquent
testimony to the exhausting physical exertions and deprivations that singers were
expected to undertake, not only during their apprenticeship but throughout their
5 Galen De sanitate tuenda pp. 358-359 Kühn.
Philomusica on-line 7 (2008)
14
careers. Thus Claudius Aelianus reports, for instance, that Diogenes the tragedysinger
renounced all «licentious bedding», and that though the kitharōidos
Amoibeus had a gorgeous young wife he never had sex with her. Quintilian, too,
asserts that sexual abstinence is essential for both singers and orators, so that
they can preserve their strength.6
So much for the general regime imposed by voice-trainers on their clients.
Several other rather general points can be extracted from the sources, for
instance that singers always did warming-up exercises before performing, and
that just as wrestlers get rubbed down with oil by their trainers before competing,
singers «soften their wind-pipes in preparation» during this warming-up
procedure; the writer probably means that they too rub their throats with oil.7 But
we would like to know also about the exact nature of the exercises they did with
the voice itself, and here the evidence is rather thin. There is some, however, and
we can start from a tiny scrap of information in Ptolemy’s Harmonics (3, 10,
p. 105, 6-11 Düring). The lowest notes of the voice, he says, are closest to silence,
and that is where vocal sound both begins and ends. «Hence οἱ φωνασκοῦντες start
their singing from the lowest notes and end on them as they finish». There is
nothing surprising about that, of course; modern singers typically do just the
same when they are practising, singing up a scale from the bottom to the top and
then back down again. The picture of singers running up and down scales, and
trying to bring the voice to perfection all through its range, reappears quite
commonly in our sources, and is often distinguished sharply from the exercises
suitable for orators or to preserve a person’s health, which should not use very
low pitches and must especially avoid very high ones.8 Cicero has some
characteristic remarks on the subject.
What is as essential to an orator as the voice? Yet I would advise no one who
cultivates the art of speaking to train his voice in the manner of Greek
tragedy-singers, who sit for many years practising delivery, and every day,
before they begin to speak, gradually arouse their voices while lying in bed;
and when they have done that they sit up and make their voices run down
from the highest to the lowest level, in some way joining the highest and the
lowest together. If we orators decided to do that, the people whose causes we
have taken on will have been condemned before we have finished reciting a
paean or a hymn as many times as is prescribed. (De oratore 1, 251)
One writer’s prescriptions for exercises to promote bodily health in general,
however, include details which seem to correspond rather closely to those that
are elsewhere reserved for singers; and if in his work the boundary between the
two sorts of regime was less clear-cut than it is in other writings, as this
6 Claudius Aelianus Varia historia 3, 30; Quintilian Institutiones oratoriae 11, 3, 19.
7 Phrynichus grammaticus Praeparatio sophistica 106; Alexander Aphrodisiensis Problemata 1, 119.
8 See for instance Quintilian Institutiones oratoriae 2, 9, 15; 11, 3, 22 and 41; Oribasius Collectiones
medicae 6, 9, 1-6; Antyllus quoted at Oribasius Collectiones medicae 6, 1, 23.
Andrew Barker – Phōnaskia for singers and orators
15
correspondence suggests, his account may give us a fair picture of one aspect of
the discipline that singers undertook. It deserves to be quoted in full. It is
concerned with the ‘warming-up’ exercises known as ἀναφωνήσεις.
A person who is about to ἀναφωνεῖν should relax the hollow channels and
rub them lightly, especially the lower parts, and sponge or wash his face
gently while making quiet preliminary murmurings, extending them
moderately; and it is better if he also begins by walking about. Then he can
proceed to ἀναφώνησις. If he has some education, let him utter (ἀναφωνείτω)
things he can remember, both those that he thinks elegant and those that
involve many transitions between smoothness and roughness. If he has no
knowledge of epic, let him perform iambics; let elegiacs have the third place
and lyric poetry the fourth. It is better for the person uttering (τὸν
ἀναφωνοῦντα) to recite from memory than to read. He should begin to utter
(ἀναφωνεῖν) from the lowest notes, relaxing the voice as much as possible,
and then proceed up to the highest; and then, without spending long at high
pitch he should turn back down again, lowering the voice gradually, until we
reach the lowest pitch, from which we began. The measure must be taken
from the individual’s capacity and his degree of enthusiasm and experience.
(Oribasius Collectiones medicae 6, 9, 1-6)
It is worth paying attention also to Cicero’s phrases about «gradually arousing
their voices», and «in some way joining the highest and the lowest together», in
the passage of the De oratore quoted above. What he means is not altogether
clear, but our sources seem to find something odd about the aspect of a singer’s
training that involves taking the voice through a sequence of very slight changes
in pitch. The medical writer Antyllus, for instance, dismisses, as unhelpful for his
therapeutic purposes, not only τὴν τῶν ὀξυτέρων φθόγγων γυμνασίαν, «exercise on
the higher notes», but also τὴν ἄχρηστον ἀπὸ τῶν ὑπάτων κατὰ μικρὸν ἐπίτασιν ἢ τὴν
παραυξήσεως φιλοτεχνίαν, «the useless increase in pitch from the lowest notes by
small steps, or the special technique of gradual augmentation». These practices
only create εὐμέλεια and χρηστοφωνία, «melodiousness and a fine voice»,
attributes that contribute nothing to health (quoted at Oribasius Collectiones
medicae 6, 10, 7).
Perhaps the key to understanding these comments can be found in passages
such as one in a letter of Seneca the Younger, where he is discussing the physical
regime that a philosopher should adopt to keep himself in good condition. He
recommends walking, exercising the arms with weights, high-jumping and longjumping,
and an exercise that he describes as something like the dance of the
Salii, or the actions of washing-men who pound clothes in a tub with their feet –
he may perhaps be thinking of running on the spot. Nor, he says, should one
neglect the voice. But he absolutely forbids [vocem] per gradus et certos modos
extollere, deinde deprimere, «raising and then lowering the voice by steps and in
specific modi»; I take the words «in specific modi» to mean «through
determinate intervals» or «following the sequences of particular scales». That, he
goes on, is like getting a special trainer to teach you how to walk; before you know
Philomusica on-line 7 (2008)
16
where you are, he will be changing the sizes of your steps and watching over
everything you eat. We should remember that our purpose is not to exercise the
voice, but for the voice to exercise us (Seneca Epistulae ad Lucilium 15, 4-8).
Singers concerned with the improvement and preservation of their vocal powers,
of course, would no doubt have subscribed to the opposite of Seneca’s last
contention, submitting more or less willingly to the disciplines which their
trainers imposed, however unnatural they might seem, since the whole purpose
of their practices was to exercise and strengthen their voices. Perhaps then,
though this is not what they explicitly say, what the doctors and rhetoricians are
really objecting to in a singer’s vocal training are not the gradual changes in pitch
as such. It is the fact that the singer has to produce them in the manner which
musical writers (and some others too) call διαστηματικὴ κίνησις, the “intervallic
motion” characteristic of melody, rather than the “continuous motion”, συνεχὴς
κίνησις, used in speech; and that in doing so he is confined to precisely specified
intervals in the voice’s upwards and downwards movements. (This may be what
Seneca has in mind when he refers sarcastically to a trainer regulating the size of
a person’s steps). All the orthodox rhetoricians agree that this ‘sing-song’ style of
delivery is inappropriate to public speaking; it is an ‘oriental’ fashion which some
orators have adopted, but is sapping the manly strength of proper forensic and
political rhetoric. If we allow that kind of delivery, says Quintilian, we might as
well go the whole hog and accompany our speeches with lyres and tibiae, or even
cymbals, which would in fact be even more appropriate to these atrocities
(Institutiones oratoriae 11, 3, 57-9; cf. Cicero Orator 57).
Much more could be said about the techniques used by orators, of course; a
good deal of information can be extracted, for example, from Quintilian
Institutiones oratoriae 11, 3, from which I have already quoted several times,
together with the passages on rhetorical delivery in Cicero De oratore, especially 3,
56-61. There is also plenty more to discover from the medical sources about the use
of vocal training in improving and preserving one’s health. They talk about deepbreathing
exercises, for instance, and offer a great many recipes for soothing and
curing sore throats, some of which were probably used by singers as much as by
anyone else. We get a hint of some early evidence of this from Antiphon’s speech
On the Choreutes, in which a man defends himself against the charge of having
poisoned a member of his chorus, and again from Theophrastus, who speaks of the
juice of the plant called πανάκης, «All-heal», as good for φωνασκίαι, as well as for the
the ears and for the pains of miscarriages and spasms (Historia plantarum 9, 9, 2).
A typical prescription is one which Galen attributes to one of his predecessors, the
doctor Crito; it involved sweet Cretan wine mixed with spices such as myrrh and
frankincense, boiled down to a syrup, which sounds rather more appealing than
many mixtures to be found in a modern pharmacist’s shop.9
9 On breathing techniques see especially Antyllus quoted at Oribasius Collectiones medicae 6, 10; for a
large selection of recipes for medicines to soothe the throat see Galen De compositione
medicamentorum secundum locos p. 35 ff. Kühn, which contains a long list of potions prescribed by
Andrew Barker – Phōnaskia for singers and orators
17
What I have not so far been able to find, however, except perhaps in the
passage quoted above from Oribasius, are more precise details about φωνασκία for
singers. This is not really surprising, since the great majority of writers on music
in this period are concerned almost exclusively with harmonic theory; the
rhetoricians and doctors quite naturally say no more about the singers’
specialised techniques than is needed to distinguish them from their own; and
most of the more broadly «cultural» texts belong to the environment of the
Second Sophistic, which are designed in large part to glorify the Greek culture of
classical times, typically echoing the rather snobbish attitude to specialised forms
of physical exertion and training which we find, for instance, in Plato. But we can
at least be sure that in the Roman world of the late Republic and the Empire, the
work of a professional singer, and of anyone who aspired to become one, involved
a great deal of persistent hard labour which was clearly distinguished from their
specifically musical activities; that they used physical exercises, medical
prescriptions and even mechanical aids – like Nero’s lead sheet – to strengthen
and discipline their breathing apparatus; that their vocal exercises were much
more elaborate and specialised than those recommended for orators; and at the
same time that they treated their voices and their bodies in general with a
delicate care which earned them the rhetoricians’ contempt. I cannot claim to
have examined every possible source, and further research may be able to reveal
more details of their regime. But even in the absence of such details it seems clear
that the physical disciplines to which singers were subjected in this period of
antiquity were at least as demanding and technically specialised as those
undergone by their modern counterparts.
other doctors, with Galen’s comments. For a review of our information about the kinds of vocal quality
expected of professional singers, and for some speculations on the subject, see WEST (1992), pp. 39-47.
Philomusica on-line 7 (2008)
18
Bibliography
ANDREW BARKER (1989), Greek Musical Writings, vol. 2: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
ANNIE BELIS (1999), Les Musiciens dans l’Antiquité, Paris, Hachette.
CLEARCHUS Fragmenta, in Poetae comici Graeci, vol. 4 (1983), ed. Rudolf Kassel et Colin
Austin, Berolini-Novi Eboraci, W. de Gruyter.
GALEN De sanitate tuenda, in Claudii Galeni opera omnia, vol. 6 (1823), ed. Karl Gottlob
Kühn, Leipzig, Knobloch (rist. Hildesheim, Olms, 1965).
GALEN De locis affectis, in Claudii Galeni opera omnia, vol. 8 (1824), ed. Karl Gottlob
Kühn, Leipzig, Knobloch (rist. Hildesheim, Olms, 1965).
GALEN De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos, in Claudii Galeni opera
omnia, vol. 1 (1827), ed. Karl Gottlob Kühn, Leipzig, Knobloch (rist. Hildesheim,
Olms, 1965).
PALLADIUS Commentaria in Hippocratis librum sextum de morbis popularibus, in Scholia
in Hippocratem et Galenum, vol. 2 (1834), ed. Friedrich Reinhold Dietz, Königsberg,
Borntraeger (rist. Amsterdam, Hakkert, 1966).
PORPHYRIUS In Ptolemaei Harmonica commentarium, in Porphyrios Kommentar zur
Harmonielehre des Ptolemaios (1932), hrsg. von Ingemar Düring, Göteborg,
Elanders.
PTOLEMAEUS Harmonica, in Die Harmonielehre des Klaudios Ptolemaios (1930), hrsg. von
Ingemar Düring, Göteborg, Elanders.
MARTIN L. WEST (1992), Ancient Greek Music, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Andrew Barker, dopo aver insegnato nelle Università di Warwick, Cambridge e Otago, è
diventato Professore Emerito di Discipline Classiche all’Università di Birmingham. È autore
di sei monografie e più di 60 articoli sulla musica e la teoria musicale greca antica, ed è
fondatore e Presidente di MOISA – The International Society for the Study of Greek and
Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage.
Andrew Barker is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham, and
had previously taught at the Universities of Warwick, Cambridge and Otago. He is the author
of six books and more than sixty articles on ancient Greek music and musical theory, and is
the founder and President of MOISA – The International Society for the Study of Greek and
Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&...q7Auyy&sig=AHIEtbRO31RREtFnCrDH7O6__HRTQ4LGzA
