Apollo Citharoedus with kithara

The cithara or kithara (Greek: κιθάρα, kithāra, Latin: cithara) was an ancient Greek musical instrumentin the lyre or lyra family. In modern Greek the word kithara has come to mean "guitar" (a word whose origins are found in kithara).

The kithara was a professional version of the two-stringed lyre. As opposed to the simpler lyre, which was a folk-instrument, the kithara was primarily used by professional musicians, called kitharodes. The kithara's origins are likely Asiatic.^[1] The barbiton was a bass version of the kithara ^[2] popular in the eastern Aegean and ancient Asia Minor.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Construction
• 2 Uses
• 3 See also
• 4 Notes
• 5 References
• 6 Further reading
• 7 External links

Construction[edit]

Greek vase drawing depicting a man playing a kithara with eight strings.

The kithara had a deep, wooden sounding box composed of two resonating tables, either flat or slightly arched, connected by ribs or sides of equal width. At the top, its strings were knotted around the crossbar or yoke (zugon) or to rings threaded over the bar, or wound around pegs. The other end of the strings was secured to a tail-piece after passing over a flat bridge, or the tail-piece and bridge were combined. Most vase paintings show kitharas with seven strings, in agreement with ancient authors, but these also mention that occasionally a skillful kitharode would use more than the conventional seven strings.

It was played with a rigid plectrum (or more modernly called pick) held in the right hand, with elbow outstretched and palm bent inwards, while the strings with undesired notes were damped with the straightened fingers of the left hand.

Uses[edit]

Alcaeus of Mytilene playing a kithara while Sappho listens byLawrence Alma-Tadema (1881). The Walters Art Museum.

The kithara was played primarily to accompany dances and epic recitations, rhapsodies, odes, and lyric songs.^[2] It was also played solo at the receptions, banquets, national games, and trials of skill. The music from this instrument was said to be the lyre for drinking parties and is considered an invention of Terpander. Aristotle said that these string instruments were not for educational purposes but for pleasure only.

The kithara was the virtuoso's instrument, generally known as taking a great deal of skill.^[3]

Sappho is closely associated with music, especially string instruments like the kithara and thebarbitos. She was a woman of high social standing and composed songs that focused on the emotions. A Greek mythology story goes that she ascended the steep slopes of Mount Parnassus where she was welcomed by the Muses. She wandered through the laurel grove and came upon the cave of Apollo, where she bathed in the Castalian Spring and took Phoebus'plectrum to play skillful music. The sacred nymphs danced while she stroked the strings with much talent to bring forth sweet musical melodies from the resonant kithara.^[4]

QUESTION: Beloved Osho, In a book I read about Gurdjieff, it was said that two of his disciples, who had been with him for a long time and in a very intimate way – for example, Thomas de Hartmann, who played his music – suddenly left him. Can you explain why this seems to happen again and again in the master-disciple relationship?

OSHO: Turiya, the question is something of deep significance and with profound implications. It is something in the very nature of things that this kind of thing happens again and again, and will continue to happen again and again; it cannot be stopped. De Hartmann lived with George Gurdjieff for perhaps the longest period of any of his other disciples, perhaps forty years or more. He was a great genius as far as music is concerned, and he was playing music for special meditations, which Gurdjieff had devised.

The music was also devised by Gurdjieff; de Hartmann had to bring the device into reality. Gurdjieff was a strange master, everything about him had the quality of strangeness. He himself was not a musician, but he understood what kind of vibrations could create certain states in man. His understanding was about man, his meditation, his mind, the possibility of his receiving certain vibrations and being affected by them. He would explain his whole program to de Hartmann, and de Hartmann had become such an expert that he would make it a reality.

But de Hartmann was not a disciple — this was where the trouble arose. He had come to George Gurdjieff to be a disciple, but his genius about music took him on a different route: rather than being a disciple, he became an associate. He started working for Gurdjieff insofar as he needed music for his special dances, and he forgot completely why he had come. Gurdjieff reminded him many times:

Mantra (Man=to think) and hymn and songs.

Music did not emerge as a result of the emergence and development of language. Music came FIRST. The language part came later.
____________
Abstract
Background: Growing evidence for overlap in the syntactic processing of language and music in non‐brain‐damaged individuals leads to the question of whether aphasic individuals with grammatical comprehension problems in language also have problems processing structural relations in music.
Aims: The current study sought to test musical syntactic processing in individuals with Broca's aphasia and grammatical comprehension deficits, using both explicit and implicit tasks.
Methods & Procedures: Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment 12 individuals with Broca's aphasia (and 14 matched controls) were tested for their sensitivity to grammatical and semantic relations in sentences, and for their sensitivity to musical syntactic (harmonic) relations in chord sequences. An explicit task (acceptability judgement of novel sequences) was used. The second experiment, with 9 individuals with Broca's aphasia (and 12 matched controls), probed musical syntactic processing using an implicit task (harmonic priming).
Outcomes & Results: In both experiments the aphasic group showed impaired processing of musical syntactic relations. Control experiments indicated that this could not be attributed to low‐level problems with the perception of pitch patterns or with auditory short‐term memory for tones.
Conclusions: The results suggest that musical syntactic processing in agrammatic aphasia deserves systematic investigation, and that such studies could help probe the nature of the processing deficits underlying linguistic agrammatism. Methodological suggestions are offered for future work in this little‐explored area.

Conclusions

I have argued that Darwin's model for language evolution, "musical protolanguage," suitably updated, provides a compelling fit to both the phenomenology of modern music and language, and to a wealth of comparative data. By placing vocal control at the centre of his model, Darwin availed himself of the rich comparative database of other species who have independently evolved complex vocal imitation, and he thus explains two of the features of human language that set if off most sharply from nonhuman primate communication systems: vocal learning and cultural transmission. The biggest missing piece in Darwin's model, as I see it, is a reasonable explanation of phrasal semantics (and the aspects of syntax that go with it), but this gap was filled by Jespersen by 1922. Together, these hypotheses provide one of the leading models of language evolution available today (for an enthusiastic book-length exploration seeMithen, 2005), and one that has been repeatedly re-discovered by later scholars (e.g., Brown, 2000; Livingstone, 1973; Richman, 1993). While many aspects of what has now become a family of models remain to be explored empirically (the issues surrounding sexual, kin and group-selection remain particularly unclear), this is a model worthy of detailed consideration and elaboration today. Most importantly, Darwin's model makes numerous testable empirical predictions (for example about the partially overlapping nature of the brain mechanisms underlying music and spoken language, and their genetic basis) that can be answered in the coming decades.

This year of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday seems an opportune time for Darwin' own model of language evolution to regain the prominence it deserves