Definitions and problems

When we hear the term ‘brass instruments’, most of us think first of standard western instruments such as the trumpet or trombone, polished precision instruments with valves or slides. These can be found all over the world today, not least in vernacular brass bands or popular music ensembles, where they exist alongside other markers of musical modernity – trap sets, keyboard synthesisers and electric guitars. This, however, is but the tip of an enormous iceberg. In looking beyond the western world, we must broaden our definition of ‘brass instruments’. In their 1914 ‘Classification of Musical Instruments’, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs applied the term ‘trumpet’ to any instrument in which ‘the airstream passes through the player's vibrating lips, so gaining intermittent access to the air column which is to be made to vibrate’. They divided this basic category into two subgroups – natural trumpets (‘without extra devices to alter pitch’) and chromatic trumpets (‘with extra devices to modify the pitch’). Further subdivisions were made on the basis of shape (conch shell or tubular in the case of natural trumpets, conical or cylindrical tubing in the case of chromatic trumpets) and means of playing (side-blown or end-blown).

While the Hornbostel–Sachs system attempts to encompass lip-vibrated instruments of all shapes and sizes, it has serious shortcomings when dealing with the non-western world. The major problem is one of lopsidedness: since the only ‘chromatic trumpets’ are western, the rest of the world has to be subsumed under the category ‘natural trumpets’. If we exclude conch-shell trumpets, a relatively small and distinctive subgroup, it leaves a bewildering variety of instruments under the catch-all heading 'tubular trumpets'. For practical purposes, then, a recent modification of the system by Genevieve Dournon, with subdivisions based on structure, shape and material, is better proportioned and allows more sophisticated distinctions among non-western instruments (see Table I).

In music, improvisation is a process in which a major portion of the resultant performance is not prearranged or anticipated. It is generated by the creator(s) during a performance. The degree to which improvisation is important varies between different musical styles, but in jazz it is virtually always central. The nature and definition of improvisation are complex issues which have been discussed in detail elsewhere. For the particularly technical purposes of the present book, it is noteworthy that improvisation commonly involves a redrawing of the assumed ground of a musical form, through instrumental technique, just as much as by musical vocabulary or structure. As John Corbett entertainingly puts it:

Jazz is a music of the twentieth century which originated in the USA from Afro-American traditions. It achieves improvised intensification by rhythmic repetition and cyclic harmonic repetition. Much jazz involves 4/4 metre, with considerable accentuation of the constituent pulses, and a vital concern with syncopation, of a subtle and complex kind. The syncopation is not simply displacing strong beats to their half-point or by whole beats, but also making irregular displacements, often in complex subdivisions of triplets and quintuplets, and accompanied by large, abrupt and transient variations in dynamic and/or emphasis: these are components of the special rhythmic ‘swing’ inherent in most jazz.

On 20 November 1906, Francis Galpin, the Anglican cleric and pioneering organologist, delivered a paper to members of The Musical Association in London. His paper, ‘The Sackbut: Its Evolution and History’, was one of the great contributions to musicology. In it Galpin explained the story of the exotic-sounding ‘sackbut’. His narrative was clear, straightforward and based on the systematic evaluation of diverse primary-source evidence. Before that evening, it was believed by some, even perhaps by some members of his distinguished audience, that the sackbut was an instrument of deep antiquity, and that its citation in the Book of Daniel (‘That at what time you hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut…’) was no less than a literal testimony of musical practice at the time when the Old Testament was written. The unarguable truth that Galpin placed before them was that ‘sackbut’ was no more than a word by which one of the most familiar musical instruments – the trombone – was once known. Furthermore, he showed that it could be dated no earlier than the fifteenth century, and that a comparison of an early example (Galpin owned an instrument made in Nuremberg in the sixteenth century) with a modern trombone revealed, on the face of it, more similarities than differences.

In the twentieth century, research has improved our knowledge of the early trombone and the way in which its idiom and repertory changed over the years. We know more now than Galpin knew at that time. It is not just that we have more information about instruments, their players, their music and the cultural contexts into which music fitted and to which it conformed. We now also have evidence drawn from sophisticated musical experiments by performers on period instruments.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the horn concertos of Mozart were recently composed, and the trumpet concertos by Haydn (1796) and Hummel (1803) suggested the birth of an era in which soloistic writing for brass instruments might provide an important means of musical expression. In fact, these propitious signals proved to be false, at least as far as the art music canon is concerned. The fact that few major composers from the nineteenth century wrote solo works for brass is surprising, given the new facility that technology brought to brass instruments.

The chief role of the trumpet, trombone and tuba in art music remained orchestral until the later twentieth century. Earlier solo and chamber music inspire curiosity and affection in the brass enthusiast, but such pieces were sporadic phenomena, arising largely through the efforts of exceptional individuals active in the orbit of some major cultural centres. A convergence of military, conservatoire and manufacturing connections were preconditions for the solo and chamber music to flourish, as indeed they did, though intermittently, in Paris, London, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, Stockholm and St Petersburg.

The trumpet enjoyed a brief flourish of solo activity in Vienna, around the beginning of the nineteenth century, centred on the exceptional Anton Weidinger (1766–1852). Weidinger was a solo performer, inventor and entrepreneur. In 1800, he premiéred the work which Joseph Haydn had been inspired to write specifically for him and his Inventions-Trompete in 1796, the Trumpet Concerto in E♭ (Hoboken VIIe:1).

A medieval Companion to Virgil would not have presented him as the author of a tightly limited canon, nor would it have related his works, as modern scholars do, to the context of political life in the early principate or to their Greek sources. It would probably have reproduced exemplary stories about the poet's life drawn from the biography attributed to Donatus, perhaps augmented with tales, which enjoyed widespread circulation in thirteenth-century Italy, of Virgil the magician (whose feats included ridding Naples of flies with a magic bronze statue). It might well have included discussion of the Appendix Virgiliana, the Culex, Ciris and miscellaneous epigrams, which were widely believed to be Virgilian juvenilia, and it would certainly also have contained a large quantity of allegorical commentary on Virgil's works. The Fourth Eclogue was often read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, while commentators such as Fulgentius (in the fifth century) established a reading of the first half of the Aeneid - which persisted until the sixteenth century - as an allegory of the moral progress of the soul from childish cupidity to maturity.

The Aeneid has a story to tell, of how Aeneas after the fall of Troy reaches Italy with a small group of followers (Books 1-6) and there fights a war with some of the native inhabitants which ends in his victory (Books 7- 12). The plot of the Aeneid is quickly told, and not that long in the enactment, but its temporal outreach is enormous, from the prehistoric past to Virgil's own day and beyond (a time-scale Ovid will extend and parody in the Metamorphoses). Like all good stories, it also has much to say about story-telling itself, and the way we plot our ends in history: and at every point who speaks and who sees admits itself of more than one story.

Narrators

The narrator of the poem is a first-century BC Latin poet, whom it is easiest to call 'Virgil': he generally retains epic anonymity, but on occasions reveals his hand (e.g. 7.1, Caieta is buried litoribus nostris, 'on our shores', or 9.446-9, Nisus and Euryalus will be famous as long as the Roman father has power si quid mea carmina possunt, 'if my poems can (do) anything'). But from the beginning we meet other storytellers within the poem: the Muse who tells him the causes of events (1.8), the anonymous narrator who told Juno of the plot of the poem before it even began (1.20 audierat, 'she had heard . . . ' : compare Dido's desperate desire Iliacos iterum demens audite labores, 'to hear again in madness the Trojan labours', 4.78), the script of the Fates (1.260) based - or is it the other way round? - on a treatment by Jupiter himself, the Master Narrator of all.

The culture of classical Greece was a performance culture. It valorised competitive public display across a vast range of social institutions and spheres of behaviour. The gymnasium with its competitions in manliness, the symposium with its performances of songs and speeches, and the theatre become - with the spreading of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean world in the wake of Alexander the Great - the key signs of Greekness itself. The dominant culture of Athens in the fifth century is particularly influential in the development of these institutions, and can be said to have invented the theatre. Yet in this, as in most respects, Athens is not a typical Greek city. For the unique institutions of Athenian democracy constitute a special type of performance culture. The lawcourts and the Assembly are the major political institutions of democracy, the city's major sites of conflict and debate, its citizens' major route to positions of power. Both lawcourts and Assembly involve large citizen audiences, public performance by speakers, and voting to achieve a decision and a result. Democracy made public debate, collective decision-making and the shared duties of participatory citizenship central elements of its political practice. To be in an audience was not just a thread in the city's social fabric, it was a fundamental political act. The historian Thucydides has Cleon, a leading politician of the fifth century, refer dismissively to the Athenians as theātai tōn logōn, 'spectators of speeches' (Thuc. 3.38); Athenian political ideology proudly highlighted democracy's special commitment to putting things es meson, 'in the public domain to be contested'. A discussion of the audience of Greek tragedy must take as its frame not modern theatrical experience but both the pervasiveness of the values of performance in Greek culture and in particular the special context of democracy and its institutions, where to be in an audience is above all to play the role of democratic citizen.

A history of the influence of Greek tragedy on later Western literature and thought, if it could be written at all, would be not only enormously long but also extremely complicated. Given the cultural prestige of tragedy, however, it is striking how rarely the plays themselves were brought to the stage until relatively recent times. The extraordinary beginning made with the production of Sophocles' Oedipus the King at Vicenza in 1585 remained a more or less isolated event until the end of the eighteenth century, and indeed it is only in the last few decades that productions of Greek tragedy have become common occurrences (see Ch. 11). What did happen, and on a large scale, was the adaptation of tragic plots to create a new corpus of dramatic texts, more often than not the product of 'contamination' with Senecan tragedy, and drawing on historical and mythological lore from non-tragic sources as well as current religious, philosophical, and political ideas.

This chapter confronts some of the intellectual and aesthetic issues involved in the process of coming to terms with Greek tragedy over the last five centuries. I limit myself largely to plays and operas (and, in the final paragraphs, films and television) that are clearly based on extant Greek originals, not because these plays are necessarily of the highest literary or cultural importance in and of themselves (though no doubt a number are), but because they suggest in obvious ways the challenge that adapters from the Renaissance onwards faced in assimilating a particularly prestigious but in many ways intractable heritage.

In retrospect, the career of Virgil seems to trace out an inevitable progression. Working within a tradition which defined poetry composed in dactylic hexameter verse as epos (connoting 'word' or 'utterance'), the poet of the Eclogues, through the figure of the shepherd-singer Tityrus, recalls how his earliest poetic production involved a rejection of martial themes (reges et proelia, 'kings and battles', Eel. 6.3) in favour of a pastoral mode, avowedly lowly and humble (cf. EcL 4.1-2), which looked back to the 'Syracusan verse' of Theocritus (EcL 6.1-2). Taking leave of this mode at the end of the final poem of the collection, the shepherd-singer, in his characteristic pose recumbent in the shade of a tree, announces his intention to rise (surgamus, EcL 10.75), presaging the composition of the Hesiodic Georgics. He thereby attributes to that poem a more elevated stylistic level, reiterates a hierarchy within the received types of epos, and begins to map an upward trajectory through those types on to the poet's life-cycle. In the opening lines of the Third Georgic, a further move upwards is envisaged (G. 3.8-9):

One way or another, sexuality has always been a topic of interest to Virgil's readers. In his life of the poet, Suetonius reports that Virgil inclined toward the love of boys and that he addressed a favourite named Alexander under the name 'Alexis' in the Second Eclogue; Martial pretends to believe that it was this rosy-lipped young slave who excited the poet to compose his Aeneid (Mart. 8.5.11-20). It is only in the past two decades, however, that scholarly interest has begun to focus on the topic of 'sexuality and gender' in antiquity. The 'and' here covers a whole range of questions - for example, how is sexual difference represented in antiquity, how is it implicated with other kinds of socially constructed differences, is 'sexuality' a discrete concept or is it still awaiting its 'invention'? I will begin this essay by surveying Virgil's Eclogues (with side-glances at the Aeneid) to see what light they can shed on some of these issues. I will then turn to my central project, which is to sketch some of the ways sexual and gender differences help to articulate Virgil's poetry.

Greek tragedy has enjoyed a vigorous afterlife on the modern stage both in the original Greek and in translation. Yet whilst the production history of, say, Shakespeare has long been the subject of academic inquiry, it is only very recently that classical scholars have appreciated both the value and the importance of charting the fortunes of Greek drama in the modern period. It is not simply that classicists need to be aware of the extent to which their own area of study has shaped major dramatic trends in Europe from at least the 1880s onwards. It is not even that a general lack of interest in such matters has meant that classical scholars have remained unaware of the (by no means insignificant) fact that Sophocles' Oedipus the King was banned from the professional stage in Britain until 1910. What a survey of modern productions of Greek plays does, above all, is provide us with a salutary reminder that contemporary investigations into Greek drama are no less time-bound than those of previous periods. Indeed, every encounter with artworks of the past is really an exploration of current concerns and needs; and nowhere is this better illustrated than through a study of the performance histories of Greek tragedies.

Yet the tendency of classical scholarship to ignore the fortunes of Greek tragedy on the modern stage is somewhat surprising. For the production histories of these plays reveal that close ties have, in fact, existed between the professional theatre and the world of scholarship since at least the nineteenth century. The row that followed Nietzsche's capitulation to Wagner and Bayreuth at the end of the nineteenth century may well be notorious (cf. Ch. 12, pp. 324-5), but it is the exceptional nature of the episode that has guaranteed its notoriety.