Musical Structure in Greek Tragedy: Introduction

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• Musical Structure in Greek Tragedy: Introduction¹
• Timothy J. Moore

The last four decades have brought remarkable progress in our understanding of ancient Greek music, including that of Athenian tragedy. Even before this revolution in the study of Greek music, however, the two basic ways in which our surviving texts reveal tragedy’s musical structure were widely acknowledged: the correlation between type of meter and musical performance, and the role of quantitative meter in determining musical rhythm.

The first key to tragedy’s musical structure is the clear evidence that, in Greek drama, iambic trimeters were as a rule spoken without accompaniment and lyric meters sung to the accompaniment of the aulos. The foundation of every tragedy’s structure, therefore, is an alternation between spoken dialogues in iambic trimeter and sung choruses in lyric meters. Playwrights sometimes diverged from this standard musical structure in three ways. First, they wrote monodies, in which an actor sang. Second, they included amoebaean passages, where two actors, or an actor and the chorus, both sang in alternation, or one sang and the other spoke iambic trimeters. Third, they used meters that were neither iambic trimeters nor lyric: primarily non-lyric anapests, trochaic tetrameters, and dactylic hexameters. The performance mode of these “in between” meters is not certain. It appears likely that playwrights and performers could choose whether passages in these meters would be accompanied by the aulos or not, and also to what degree performers’ mode of utterance would approach what we would call speech, song, or chant. At the very least, the rhythms [End Page 3] of these meters brought a heightening of musicality greater than iambic trimeters but probably not matching that of lyrics.

The second way surviving texts reveal musical structure lies in the quantitative nature of Greek meter. Recent scholarship has made clear that it would be naïve to assume an exact correspondence between musical rhythm and meter, especially after the musical innovations of the fifth century. Nevertheless, meter, with its opposition of long and short syllables, must have been the foundation of sung rhythm. This relationship means two important things for structure. First, it means that any repetitions and contrasts in meter would also mean repetitions and contrasts in rhythm. Such repetitions and contrasts would therefore be heard clearly in performance and could play an important role in providing structure. More specifically, the close correspondence between meter and rhythm means that the metrical responsion that pervades Greek tragedy’s lyrics—the most conspicuous structural feature in most lyric passages—would represent clearly audible rhythmic repetition. As several of the authors in this issue note, there is a very high degree of probability that that responsion also called for repeated melodies and responding choreography.

The essays in this special issue of Arethusa combine an awareness of these two principles with the latest results of research on ancient music to provide new perspectives on how the musical structure of tragedy worked.

Armand D’Angour, in “The Music of Tragedy: Implications of the Reconstructed Orestes Papyrus,” examines what the most important piece of tragic music that has survived from antiquity, a third-century bce papyrus preserving part of a chorus from Euripides’ Orestes, can tell us about Greek tragic music. The notation on the papyrus, D’Angour concludes, reveals the importance of mimetic word painting, pitch accents, parallel musical phrasing, and spoken interjections in tragic song. Tragic melodies would sound less unfamiliar to modern listeners than has often been thought, and they would be performed in units different from those assumed by modern metricians. Movement by choruses is likely to have been solemn and simple, even when they sang complex meters.

In “Anapests and the Tragic Plot,” Timothy Moore examines how one type of meter, anapestic, contributes to structure across extant tragedy. Moore observes that fifteen of the surviving Greek tragedies feature an unusual use of anapests in their early scenes and then repeated use of anapests at significant moments later in the play. In each, Moore argues, this combination of musical surprise and repetition is used to draw attention to the driving force of the play’s plot. [End Page 4]

The next three essays approach responsion from three...