A flutist’s brains can never stay: He puffs his flute, they’re puffed away.
It was usual to play on two flutes at the same time. Such a pair has been found,[308] together with a lyre, in a tomb at Athens. The flutes are somewhat over a foot in length, and have five holes on the upper and one on the lower side. Each has a separate mouthpiece. Besides this, flute-players sometimes wore a sort of leathern muzzle[309] over their mouths; but this does not appear in the schools. The pair of flutes were carried in a double case, made of some spotted skin; it had a pocket on one side, to hold the mouthpieces,[310] and a cord attached by which it could be hung up when not in use. The two flutes seem to have corresponded to treble and bass, “male” and “female” as Herodotos calls them. The treble was on the right, the bass on the left.[311] Flutes could be set to different harmonies, apparently by some rearrangement of stops. In the case of the flute, as in the case of the lyre, individual tuition was the rule. First the master played an air, and then the boy had to repeat it, while the master criticised.[312] Or the master played the air on a barbitos and sang to it, while the pupil accompanied him on the flute. This method had two advantages. The master was able to play at the same time as the boy, and give him instruction while playing, which the flute prevented him from doing. The song, too, which he was enabled to sing obviated one of the chief disadvantages of the flute: for the Hellenes objected to instrumental music as meaningless, unless it was accompanied by words.
There seem to have been music-schools scattered throughout Attica, besides those established in the capital: the description of the village boys marching off to the lyre-master’s in a snow-storm without overcoats has already been quoted. The names of a few masters are extant. Lampros taught Sophocles the poet.[313] Sokrates[314] recommends Nikias to send his son to the famous Damon, who “is not merely a first-class musician, but also just the man to be with boys like this.” But whether these musicians kept regular schools cannot be ascertained. Sokrates himself in his later years attended the music-school of Konnos, and learned among the boys. “I am disgracing Konnos the music-master,” he says, “who is still teaching me to play the lyre. The boys who are my schoolfellows laugh at me and call Konnos the ‘Greybeard teacher.’”[315] The same Konnos adopted the common but iniquitous custom of bestowing his chief attention on his more promising pupils, while neglecting the backward.[316] Aristophanes caricatures Kleon’s school-days as follows: “The boys who went to school with Kleon say he would often set his lyre to the Dorian (= Gift-ian) harmony alone. Finally, the lyre-master lost his temper and told the paidagogos to take him away, saying, “This boy can’t learn anything but the Briberian (Dorodokisti) mode.”[317]