From the late medieval period and right the way through the Renaissance we see an abundance of images of Apollo and Orpheus playing the lyre, yet the evidence of a revival of lyre playing to support such images is remarkably absent. There are reasons why we should see so many images of this antique instrument, because of the abundance of iconography from the Classical period to support them, including significant Greek and Roman sculpture. At the same time, an ignorance of the musical traditions of ancient times played a part as did the gradual understanding of solfeggi and the evolution of equal temperament tuning. Whereas the seven strings of the lyre were tuned in order to set the lyre into the mode required for a particular repertoire, equal temperament appeared to be an improvement on the musical traditions of the ancients, allowing for more versatility, enabling instruments to follow a harmonic line and to play together in polyphony. To the minds of the late medieval period, following the pioneering discoveries of Guido of Arezzo in the 10th century, they may have even imagined that they had exceed the beauty and completeness of music of the ancients. In some ways this could be considered true, but the limits to Classical music, if they can be so called, relied on a sophisticated idea of what each of the modes represented for which playing notes outside of those required of that particular mode went completely against the philosophy of music. Aristoxenus in the 4th century BC had already theorised a twelve-note division of the octave without finding purpose for it, and ideas of the modes remained central to music theory through the medieval period. What probably happened was the rise of polyphony in the wake of Guido of Arezzo demonstrated that even if one wrote a melody within a given mode, in order to harmonise between voices, notes outside of the modal scale would be called for. Ultimately therefore the nascent idea of the modes exists in the different key signatures used for different music is the way in which the modes have never been truly lost from musical theory, but more versatile ways of conceptualising music allow both for sophisticated harmony and the able to modulate from one emotion to another.
In the period we term the High Renaissance, from about 1480 we begin to see something rather more interesting in terms of artistic representation, for the same artists seem to simultneously bring these tropes into their own ideas of modernity, replacing the lyre with the lira da braccio or some kind of violin-like object, and equally the syrinx or aulos of antiquity more commonly becomes a set of bagpipes. Why the difference, or the duality? Is it a question of competing cultural ideology? I think that the artists of the time were versed in both the representation of the true antique, and equally interested in bringing classical mythology into the High Renaissance. Hence depending on the situation, artists could work between the two paradigms. Raphael, in painting the Papal apartments in the Vatican introduced the myth of Apollo and Marsyas to the ceiling above Parnassus. Morals about the punishment of pride, and the reward for virtue inherent in the myth of Marsyas seem to be an appropriate warning to hang over the heads of the Popes in the space where the most important decisions of the papacy were to be made.
This shows particularly interesting contrast with the depiction of Apollo in Parnassus, the fresco in the archway just to the left. Raphael exploited his knowledge of Roman sculpture to create the forms of each of the figures within this. The prototype for Apollo is evidently the Roman Apollo Altemps sculpture, a seated version of the more common Apollo Citharoedus archetype. However, with our knowledge of this repertoire, we find that Apollo has adopted the new lira da braccio, and has handed his kithara (the instrument found in the Roman prototypes, and by far the most technollogically advanced variant of the lyre) to one of the muses seated at his feet (either Euterpe or Calliope, others have different ideas, but I think the identity rests on the kind of music that they are likely to be playing. Terpsichore, who she is often identified as has no place seated amongst poets). This is a gesture, in line with Raphael’s assembly of ancient and modern poets, and in homage to Marco Girolamo Vida’s De Arte Poetica that see’s Apollo embracing the modern age. More on Vida here. To see these two Raphael compositions in such close intended proximity seems to demonstrate the narrative of the Lira da Braccio as the successor of the lyre better than anywhere else.
In as extreme a contrast as possible, Benedetto Montagna’s allegory of Marsyas and Apollo may be exactly contemporaneous, engraved around 1510-15 may take the subtle allusion to an extreme, where there is almost no sense of the identity of the figures of classic myth except that Apollo, with his violin-like thing, is also an archer carrying his bow and arrows.
Some part of the narrative to explain this phenomenon seems to push back to 1492 and the adoption of the fiddle into the high culture of the Renaissance in the matriarchal court of Isabella d’Este. In substituting wind consorts deemed phallic for the concept of the viol, and the violin used to replace the militaristic groups of sackbut and cornet players for dance music, there is a moment in time when the violin and viol as new concepts for music can be seen as feminine in nature. Given how well suited they were to music of high culture, this seems to have led to the noblemen in Isabella’s broad circle finding the ways to incorporate the bowed stringed instruments into a masculine narrative. Hence, we see an outpouring of allegories of the birth of harmony through the union of Mars and Venus, and the celebration of Apollo as an emblem of male virtuosity. At the Palazzo del Te on the outskirts of Mantua, Federico II of Gonzaga commissioned Giulio Romano to create major decorative works including a monumental fresco of the myth of Marsyas and Apollo. it survives only from a preparatory sketch preserved in the Louvre, but was there for long enough for Titian to see it in order to realise his own painting on the subject.
To my mind Raphael is alluding to something further, and I wonder if his papal apartments serve as the definitive text for my hypothesis of the Marsyas Paradox which I see as self-evident in High Renaissance Humanist thought. If there are written texts, I am interested to hear of them, but have yet to find anything yet.
The crux of the myth is that Marsyas a faun and hence a mortal challenged Apollo a god to a contest to establish which of the two was the greatest musician in the world. Marsyas played the aulos (a flute, but he is frequently depicted with a syrinx, i.e. panpipes), putting everyone into a frenzy in which they started dancing wildly. Apollo played the lyre, accompanying his song, and did it so beautifully that everyone was still and had tears in their eyes. What happened next was a bit of a fudge, with different tellings of the story. According to one source (Hygnius) Marsyas won the first round of the competition, whereupon Apollo turned his lyre upside down for the second round and played the same tune. Marsyas could not do that, and so he lost. Diodorus Siculus suggests that Marsyas was defeated when Apollo added his voice to the sound of the lyre, making him the more complete of the two musicians. Marsyas protested arguing that the contest was to compare only the skill of the instrument, not the voice. Apollo responded that when Marsyas blew into his pipes, he was doing the same as singing. Whichever way, the Nysean nymphs who were judging the contest could not judge a mortal victor over a god, so they found a technicality upon which to pronounce Apollo the winner. For his hubris of challenging a God, Marsyas was flayed alive with his skin to be used to make a winesack.
The paradox that arises from this, although not a concern to the ancient writers of the myth, is that with Apollo not emerging as a clear winner, the music Apollo was able to play appears to fall short of perfection. When we add in a dash of Christian ideology, in which the celestial choirs of angels offer the promise of musical perfection, we are left thinking that if Apollo’s music was just as lacking as that of Marsyas, then even the gods on Parnassus lacked a perfection in their music. This paradox offers a variety of tantalising ideas – an allowance for the harmonic development of music in the medieval period and into the Renaissance as an advancement beyond the Greeks and Romans, the very definition of the Renaissance ideal of absorbing, understanding and then mastering – going beyond – the arts of the Ancient civilisations, knowing that there was a self-evident gulf between the music of Apollo and Marsyas and that of the Celestial choirs of angels. More prosaically, was there a musical instrument that could combine the musical qualities of both Marsyas and Apollo, and could this invention be the route towards a more celestial experience of music.
To my mind, this brings us to the violin and its near relations, the viol and lira da braccio. Collectively, the use of the bow, provides a similar sustained notes and expressive variation of notes that we find with wind instruments, but it allows the musician to accompany singing. There are other complicated elements of Greek philosophy, in particular Plato’s desire to ban wind instruments because of the way that they drew the life-force out of the player, simultaneously creating a transient beauty whilst taking away life from the musician… a philosophical idea that seems to be at the foundations of the morals of this myth, punishing pride and rewarding virtue. There are other elements too. By the time of Giovanni Maria Lanfranco’s Scintille de Musica published in 1534, tuning in fifths for the lira and violin appears to have been set in stone. We can argue, as we can argue many things about violin design, that tuning in fifths, which I will grandly called the diapente is the best tuning for a melodic instrument given the anatomical nature of the human that is playing it. True… But the magic of the diapente, is that every one of the classical modes is set by the intervals between the notes within the first five. If you tune your strings in fifths, than the most common modes simply repeat the same intervals on the next string. This division of strings into fifths, according to the diapente means that it is relatively easy for a musician to train themselves so that they can transition between modes within the nature of playing music. Since the fourth century BC when Artistoxenus appears to have theorised the existence of the twelve note scale the potential for this way of encompassing all of the modes within seems to have existed even as the conceptual importance of the lyre within it’s own celestial language mitigated against its use. In the playing of the lira da braccio, especially with the use of frets, the instrument that we see as being chromatic in nature could have been regarded more as setup not just to play in modes but to modulate between them in a way that had not been possible with the instruments of Ancient Greece and Rome.
When we return to Raphael’s Parnassus there is another of the muses (I think she’s Euterpe) sitting at the facing left side of Apollo. In her hand is what appears to be a very well observed Roman aulos. Hence if the Aulos is to Apollo what the Kithara is in the arms of Calliope/Euterpe on his right, there seems to be a kind of triptych in which the lira da braccio is raised to a greater level than both the instruments of Marsyas and of Apollo then we seem to see evidence of the elevation of the music of Apollo to greater heights in the time of Raphael than had been known to the Muses. It makes sense compositionally.
Just as the term ‘lira da braccio’ invokes the ancient lyre, the seven strings relate to the seven strings of the lyre, which in turn are the seven planets. The instrument seems to have been particularly in vogue in from the 1490s to about 1540. Occasionally it is found later, such as in Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas and even seventeenth century paintings including Jan Breughel’s Allegory of the sense of sound (1618) meanwhile several surviving examples from the end of the sixteenth century seem to be almost as much a throwback at that point as we would think of them now. I think that the in essence the bourdon strings, additional to the four upper strings posed a hindrance to playing and eventually musicians realised that the lira without bordons, i.e. the violin provided a platform for more virtuosic playing. Anyhow, the wonders of the diapente arguably superseded in sophistication whatever advantages existed in having a celestial number of strings.
This in turn does impact what we know of Andrea Amati’s instruments of the 1560s, where instead of the three strings advocated in 1534 by Lanfranco, the addition of a fourth string emerges. There are other purely technical reasons for going from three to four strings, for having equal tension on each bridge foot, rather than one string in the centre makes the bridge vibrate differently and combined with the acoustical reinforcement of the bottom string, these conspire to make a richer, arguably more voice-like sound. The finer points of the acoustics were probably unknown to Andrea Amati and his contemporaries, but the empirical observation of sound would have been clear to them. When Catherine de Medici ordered a set of instruments by 1564 from Andrea Amati, the purpose seems to have been to provide instrumental accompaniment to the massed voices reciting myth and modern history narrative in the context of the festivities and progresses across France in honour of her son, Charles IX. My hypothesis, that the Charles IX set served the purpose formerly occupied by the lira but within the context of massed and probably polyphonic performance. Through the sixteenth century we repeatedly see the violin in the role of the lyre rather than the lira da braccio. As the latter instrument fell from view, there may be something to be said for Roger North’s early 18th century commentary that “The best utensil of Apollo, the violin, is so universally courted, and sought after….” although everything said by North needs to be taken within a context. He may simply have been florid in his language. Nonetheless there is an interesting dramatic moment in Marco di Gagliano’s Dafne – first performed in Florence in 1599, the libretto published in 1608, where in the final scene where Apollo is scored to play some kind of plucky thing that is completely drowned out by three off-stage violins to give the effect that his lyre is making the sustained sounds of string playing. (Thanks to Will Copeland for pointing that out).
I have written recently on Jacques Besson’s new musical instrument in the Theatrum Instrumentorum et Machinum, first published in 1572, but consolidating ideas from earlier in his life. His idea of an instrument that could do everything I have described of the lira da braccio, particularly his absolute insistence on its ability to “produce a varied and pleasant harmony, tempered by equal modes” seems textually linked to the ideas that I am toying with. The instrument was yet more sophisticated than that, so sophisticated in fact that he recorded the design not as something that could be copied, but to demonstrate a theoretical design that he found impossible to render into a working prototype. What makes this remarkable as an intellectual exercise is the mechanism that he provided “to which the sounds of the lyre and trumpet are in a way related”. His achievement, at least on paper, was an instrument that by the simple depression of the chinrest could transform its sound from that of the Gods and the mortal world to that of the underworld. At a time when the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice had considerable popularity, this seems to be the workings of a lira da braccio that could traverse the River Styx to give voice to both worlds. It failed. Yet. I think the ambition for this kind of philosophically complete instrument gives me a certain amount of vindication for my question about the Marsyas Paradox. Read on here if you want to.
In England in there is one remarkable instrument, the 1618 viol by Henry Jaye. There are a few things to say about this, which is geometrically one of the most perfect English viols I have encountered, suggesting that it was made with some special purpose. It has, or so Dietrich Kessler told me, thirty meters of purfling across the back and sides as well as in the repeating diamond patterns of the front. Across the back and sides these surely mimic the cutting motion of the body being flayed, and the thick original varnish is blood red, almost like a well aged steak. It was Dietrich Kessler who identified the look of sheer agony within the carved head, and noted that the tears of Marsyas along with his blood and the tears of his friends fell to the ground and created the River Marsyas in Phyrigia. There is little evidence of this myth amongst the standard English repertoire but at the time that this was made, Alethia, Countess Arundel was in Italy collecting art to be sent back to England including Titian’s the acquisition of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. Hence both the making of this instrument in Southwark, and the arrival of Titian’s painting to Arundel House in the Strand are remarkably synchronistic at a time when the myth has so little presence in the English repertoire. To play upon this viol with the cutting motion of the bow, I would argue is to be as Apollo flaying Marsyas alive. Could this even be a statement? Just as Edward Elgar, master of the King’s Music rode on his bicycle named Mr Phoebus, for Apollo’s other identity the charioteer bringing the sun across the horizon every dawn, could the art connoisseur (also bound up with the Arundels) and first master of the King’s Musick, Nicholas Lanier have similarly self-identified as Apollo through the iconography of this viol? These delicious possibilities are there to taunt us.
