As usual, Cicero is illuminating: “a life without music is like a body without its soul.” There’s an undeniable truth in his words the people of his motherland, glorious Rome, always kept in mind. Indeed, the Romans loved music and if they didn’t give to it the same ethical and didactic value the Greeks did, they certainly recognized to it immense virtues. Sources tell us Romans’ lives were filled with music, just as ours are today: they had music during weddings and funerals, parties and holy rituals, theatre representations and even during battle.
Yet, music is ethereal and, without standardized ways to write it, the melodies of Rome went, like the buzz of her streets and the heady scents of her matrons. But Rome left us literature, visual and performing art, technology, she left us the very blueprint of how our society works: in each and every one of these aspects Roman music survived.
Memories of its role and presence filled Latin verse, prose and theatre; its soulful nature was the matter of philosophy; the instruments used to perform it, clever – albeit not always original to the Romans – vestiges of human inventiveness.
Of course, the people of Rome didn’t discover music, nor were they the first to make of it an important part of their existence. From the Greeks, they inherited musical system and melodic elements, but refrained from embracing the typically Hellenic idea of music as a means of moral and ethical education. In the end, Athens was mother to philosophers, but Rome -a bit like Sparta had been – was mother to soldiers and military leaders: music was martial, it was used to encourage fighters during battle and to solemnly accompany parades, military ceremonies, the return of victorious warlords. But music was powerful as it was godly, so its flow pinned to memory propitiatory rituals and religious functions.
But soon, the Romans discovered how versatile music could be. In the 1st century BC, it became part of theatrical representations such as the pantomime, where protagonist were common men and women and their daily lives. Historical and mythological plays became also popular, and music was always part of them. Theatre, then, is where music, so to speak, turned into a popular affair in Rome. And theatre, in those 50 years before the birth of Christ, was fairly important in the Eternal City: its first stable one was built by Pompey in 55 BC and not so long after, in 17 BC, Horace Carmen Saeculare was performed with music.
In Rome, then, music soon lost that quintessentially spiritual and moral connotation it used to have in Greece, to be transformed into a faithful companion of people’s everyday life, which it describes and punctuates often. To meet the first solely musical representations, in the form of instrumental and vocal performances, we have to wait the late imperial period, when talented musicians and singers were coveted members of the Emperor’s court.
Speaking about the historical face of Roman music may be interesting, but the question is: how did it sound like? We may not have recordings or scores, but certainly we do know how their instruments looked like and, thanks to the usual heady mix of archaeology, history and craftsmanship, we ended up reproducing them. Romans rocked wind instruments like the tibia, similar to the Greek aulos, and the tuba, an ancestor of our trumpets; they also had a cornu (or buccina), a curved metal instrument similar to the modern natural horn.
Wind instruments were also important for the martial role of music, as they were used in the castrum to organize its daily activities and, never to be forgotten, it was to their voices that battles would begin. Flavius Vegetius, Latin writer of the 4th century, tells us that “every legion has someone playing the trumpet, the horn and the buccina. The trumpet tells to soldiers it’s time to attack or retreat. When the horns call, it’s standard bearers who answer.
Again, trumpets resound when soldiers are called to some mission.” Each instrument, it seems clear, had a specific role and duty. Trumpets and horns were used largely during battle; the buccina called soldiers to gather, but was also an instrument of power, as it was used in presence of a general, or when leading a soldier to gallows, as a symbol of the authority that wanted his conviction. The buccina was also commonly used to stress the various moments of military life, like the beginning and the end of a guard’s shift, the beginning of a mission and the end of daily manual work in the castrum. Horns were used, as Flavius Vegetius told us, to give orders to standard bearers and signal when they had to begin and stop marching.
Of course, Rome knew also string instrument such as the notorious cithara, made popular by the – false – image of Nero playing it while watching Rome burning, and the lyre. Percussions were also common with timpani and cymbals among the most used.
Historical and literary texts of Roman times have been an essential source for our knowledge of music in those centuries, however, no example of Latin musical notation and composition has reached our times, excepted for a small fragment, but in Greek notation, of a comedy by Terence, Silicius’ epitaph and an Apollonian hymn composed in Delphi, thus of Greek origin, were a certain Limenius sang the power of Rome.
Nothing remains of the music of those centuries, you may think, but it’s not entirely true: it’s because of Rome’s own love and appreciation for music that early Christians began using it in their own ceremonies and prayers, as witnessed by the Oxhyrhyncus Papyri of the 1st- 2nd century AD, where a prayer dedicated to the Holy Trinity was punctuated by the use of a xylophone. And since the Middle Ages, all the way through the Renaissance, the Baroque era, up to the times of Romanticism and even in the 20th century, sacred music has been representing one of the highest embodiments of western musical production: in way, we owe this to the Romans, too.
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