Roman Pantomime Aesthetics: Summary of Components Supporting Pantomime Musical Accompaniment

Pantomime: The History and Metamorphosis of a Theatrical Ideology: Table of Contents

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Summary of Components Supporting Pantomime Musical Accompaniment

Theater music in the Roman world functioned according to a hierarchical system of signification. Music that was appropriate or satisfying to audiences of the pantomime conformed to rules or conventions governing the forms of music, the types of musical instruments, and the roles of musicians in performance. In the pantomime aesthetic, the focus of perception was always the star dancer-actor, and music was subordinate to the ambitions of the star. The music therefore always followed the movements of the dancer and shifts in tonality or rhythms resulted from physical cues given by the dancer. The star performers did not build dances around given pieces of music; rather, the accompaniment functioned like a soundtrack, with music especially composed for the performance of a scene or given pieces heavily edited to fit the objectives of the dancer. Nevertheless, star performers faced severe constraints on their power to use music, although at the time, it is possible that no one even acknowledged the intensity of these constraints, so ingrained were the conventions controlling the production of music in the ancient world. Music amplified the idea that performance revealed the individuality of the performer rather than the power of an identity achieved through repetition or uniformity of shared traits. Theater orchestras were small and contained no doubling of instruments; hippodrome orchestras contained some doubling to produce a louder sound. But instruments for the theater were limited to the lyre, cithara, tibia, syrinx, organ, tympanum, cymbals, crotali, scabellum, and bells, and never were all these instruments allowed to play together. Instruments were appropriate only for particular scenes and not any scene. An orchestra containing more than three musicians was quite rare. Singers might appear in the pantomime program, but seldom as accompaniment for the star pantomime’s movements. The theater favored instruments that allowed the musicians to move while playing, so that making music was synonymous with dancing. Pantomime musical performance was largely a female profession, with some instruments, such as cymbals, performed exclusively by women. The trumpets and horns played in the hippodrome or in processions for state functions “belonged” to the military and only men were permitted to play them. The music itself derived from the complicated system of “modes” developed by the Greeks. But in Roman times, the pervasive taste was for a musical aesthetic that deviated substantially from the musical ideals that created the mode system. Audiences appreciated intensely chromatic effects that “moved” the listener toward deeper emotional engagement with the “reality” of the performance. Music stirred rather than calmed. But lyrical and melodic structures prevailed over rhythmic structures as the foundation of emotional provocation. Complex drum patterns requiring two hands were virtually non-existent, not because of any taboo or superstition against drumming, but because the Roman culture could not even imagine a way in which drumming might be interesting. The sole drum used by the culture, the tympanum, could not produce a complex rhythm and functioned more to provide an important tone than a rhythmic underpinning. The subordination of rhythm to melody actually allowed music to adopt a wider range of rhythmic structures than music dominated by a strong “pulse.” Complex melodies encouraged unusual rhythmic structures, which in turn enhanced the instability defining relations between time and movement. Synchronization between movement and the “beat” was not a significant sign of choreographic virtuosity. Music functioned more like a comment on the action rather than a determinant of it, a way of cueing the audience’s response to the action. By depressing the value of the “beat,” pantomimes dramatized the “freedom” of the performer from an external power, including even the mythic identities they enacted. In the imperial aesthetic of the pantomime, both music and myth were subordinate to the star performer’s ambition to treat myth as something that “belonged” to him, like a set of jewels, rather than anything that controlled or usurped him. The unstable tension between music and movement was the key to the performer’s “transcendence” of language, for it was always language that was the great constraint on the freedom to move, to metamorphose glorified by the imperial aesthetic. 

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