Melody
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In ancient myths of music, melody often takes second place to harmony. The story of Pan’s duel with Apollo, the god of music, established this hierarchy through unequal participants, but also planted a seed of doubt through a disagreement over the duel’s outcome. After speaking poorly of Apollo’s gift, Pan was summoned to a competition between his monophonic pipes and Apollo’s multi-stringed lyre. This was to be judged by the old mountain god, Timolus. While Pan’s wild melody coaxed and charmed the animals, Apollo’s ‘skillful thumb’ brought forth such ‘sweetness’ from his strings that the sound won over all listeners but one. King Midas defiantly disagreed with Timolus’ judgment, upon which—so the tale goes—Apollo promptly transformed Midas’ ears into those of an ass. Jean Matheus’ seventeenth-century engraving captures the scene (figure 1), depicting hands raised, symbolically, in protest and power. While the tale scarcely conceals an official criticism of poetic form in which the bucolic is outranked by the lyric, it also offers license for a dissenting view of melody. For Midas’ pleasure in Pan’s melody, so shamefully written into his visage, establishes a precedent for defying the hierarchy of a cosmic harmony, for prioritizing melody as an autonomous form.
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Leverhulme Trust (PLP-2014-336)