MUSIC
Double Aulos Player and Maenad
On this Attic vase from about 470 BC we have
a player of the double aulos (an oboe-like instrument), wearing
the professional costume of a musician, a decorated tunic with long sleeves.
He also wears a leather mouth-band, which holds the double aulos
in place. An aulos player typically accompanied choral songs in tragedy
and comedy. Here we see a scene from a tragedy. In front of
the musician is a Maenad, who has just participated in the Dionysiac ritual
of tearing apart an animal, in this case a deer and holds a bleeding leg.
She differs from most maenads on vases in her hairstyle, which goes straight
up from her forehead and is arranged stiffly around her shoulders and neck.
Because hair in this period was usually arranged much more naturally, the
artist may have intended his audience to understand that this hair is the
wig of a mask. Therefore this would be a depiction of a maenad as
a member of a tragic chorus dancing to the music of the double aulos player.
There is one problem. The naked breasts of this maenad obviously
indicate a female chorus member and, of course, in drama men portray all
roles. This, however, need not trouble us, because the artist is
probably exercising artistic license. In painting, a male chorus
member representing a woman could be depicted as a real woman. This
painting dates from the time of Aeschylus, who wrote at least two plays
on Dionysiac themes: The Bacchae and The Bassarae, so the
painting could be a reference to one of these plays.
It should be noted that the playwright was
a composer as well as a poet. Almost no music has survived from the
fifth century except for two fragments from choruses of Euripides. The
performance of songs (words and music) was originally the province of the
chorus, but gradually poets began to write songs for actors, while diminishing
the role of the chorus. The alternation of dialogue and song is characteristic
of most Greek tragedies. Although exceptions can be found, choral
songs generally acted as dividers between scenes of dialogue.
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