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Sakadas And The Delphic Soundscape

Decent Essays

The incorporation of new musical styles had great impact on the Delphic soundscape: Sakadas won through the performance of the Pythikos nomos, an auletic composition that depicted Apollo`s victory over the Python, and that agonal piece eventually became a standard fare in Pythian competitions. The prestige of the winning musicians served in negotiating and formalizing human hierarchies – hierarchies of winning musicians - but also in constituting a new performative hierarchy – a hierarchy based on winning sound-patterns. On the competitive stage, the victorious soundscape, such as the Pythikos nomos of Sakadas, was being transformed into the "correct" soundscape, and thus, the musical competitions became the main mechanism for the incorporation …show more content…

On the one hand, the agones served as cultural venue for the preservation of cultic soundscapes, allowing repeated performances and thus the constitution of common musical tastes. On the other hand, they were fundamental for the development and evolution of new musico-ritualistic styles. Accordingly, the nomoi were heralded in Greek musicological ideology as inherently conservative by nature. It is tempting to assume that this trait emanated from the basic prerequisites of the agonal mechanics themselves. The performing musician had to stick to clear and regulated musical boundaries, if only as to conform to current musical tastes and to the supposedly homogeneous formal basis that allowed comparison between performances and hence any act of judgment. But, at the same time, the nomoi allowed enough margins as to tolerate wide range of musical self-expressions and performative innovations. Indeed, musical innovations were inherent to the agonal practice, for only by some degree of performative and expressive innovation, by surprising the crowd and judges, could a musician claim the victory. This tendency is apparent already in Terpandros who sang a praise to originality in his lines, “I will sing new songs to the seven-toned …show more content…

The most respected class of nomoi were the kitharoidic which were ascribed interchangeably to Terpandros as to Philammon the Delphian. Setting aside the insolvable problem of authorship, those kind of statements tend to show that those nomoi were indeed part of the Pythian performative materials: Delphic agenda to localize Lesbian kitharoidia through the local musician Philammon would have been pointless unless those nomoi would have been a put to standard use in the Pythian Games. The evolution of auletic nomoi, for which we have even less information, also hints at Delphic involvement. Olympus, one of the originators of the style, was said to have constructed the Polykephalos nomos to honor Apollo. Here we don`t have a definite Delphic connection but we can assume such a link though the preeminence of the Pythian Games in the field of musical competitions, the main arena for auletic nomoi performances. Another major progenitor of the auletic nomoi was Sakadas of Argos, who composed and performed his popular Pythikos nomos specifically for the Pythian

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