Greek music was primarily and chiefly vocal. Instrumental music was looked upon as essentially subordinate,--an accompaniment or at best an imitation of singing. For in the view of the Greeks the words ([Greek: lexis]) were an integral part of the whole composition. They contained the ideas, while the music with its variations of time ([Greek: rhythmos]) and pitch ([Greek: harmonia]) furnished a natural vehicle for the appropriate feelings. Purely instrumental music could not do this, because it could not convey the ideas or impressions fitted to be the object of feeling. Hence we find Plato complaining on this ground of the separation of poetry and music which was beginning to be allowed in his time. The poets, he says, rend asunder the elements of music; they separate rhythm and dance movements from melody, putting unmusical language into metre, and again make melody and rhythm without words, employing the lyre and the flute without the voice: so that it is most difficult, when rhythm and melody is produced without language, to know what it means, or what subject worthy of the name it represents ([Greek: kai hotô eoike tôn axiologôn mimêmatôn]). It is utterly false taste, in Plato's opinion, to use the flute or the lyre otherwise than as an accompaniment to dance and song[1]. Similarly in the Aristotelian _Problems_ (xix. 10) it is asked why, although the human voice is the most pleasing, singing without words, as in humming or whistling, is not more agreeable than the flute or the lyre. Shall we say, the writer answers, 'that the human voice too is comparatively without charm if it does not _represent_ something? ([Greek: ê oud' ekei, ean mê mimêtai, homoiôs hêdy?]) That is to say, music is expressive of _feeling_, which may range from acute passion to calm and lofty sentiment, but feeling must have an object, and this can only be adequately given by language. Thus language is, in the first instance at least, the matter to which musical treatment gives artistic form. In modern times the tendency is to regard instrumental music as the highest form of the art, because in instrumental music the artist creates his work, not by taking ideas and feelings as he finds them already expressed in language, but directly, by forming an independent vehicle of feeling,--a new language, as it were, of passion and sentiment,--out of the absolute relations of movement and sound. The intimate connexion in Greek music between words and melody may be shown in various particulars. The modern practice of basing a musical composition--a long and elaborate chorus, for example--upon a few words, which are repeated again and again as the music is developed, would have been impossible in Greece. [Footnote 1: Plato, _Legg._ p. 669.]