ARETHUSA最新文献

Abstract:

Evidence for the musical and dance elements of Attic tragedy is extremely scarce. However, a papyrus fragment dating from around 300 bc contains a section of a chorus from Euripides’ Orestes with musical notation (possibly the dramatist’s own); it may be analysed, both in its lacunose state and in a proposed reconstruction for performance, to throw light on these very elements. The papyrus markings and associated commentary offer clues to the melodisation of Greek poetry, performance effects in choral song, the nature of dochmiac rhythm, and the kind of dance movements that might have accompanied vigorous passages in tragic lyric.

Abstract:

Anapests, consisting always of elements of the same length (one long or two short syllables), are conducive to expressing both steady forward motion and the metaphorical motion that drives a plot to its conclusion. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides repeatedly take advantage of this association between anapests and steady motion to underline the driving forces of their plots. They call attention to those driving forces through unusual or unexpected use of anapests early in a play, then repeat the anapests in related passages later.

• 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

Abstract:

The antistrophic pairs of the choral odes of Aeschylus’s Persians are frequently marked by close verbal and thematic parallels in a symmetrical fashion. This “strophic bonding” permits more precise speculation about the possible performative relation between strophic pairs in the choral odes of a play that culminates in the explicit display of parallel lamenting gestures in the concluding strophic pairs of the exodos. The repeated themes, sounds, gestures, images, and phrases in the play’s strophic pairs serve as well to define and perform the changing relation between Persian royal leaders and their choral subjects in the play as a whole.

• From the Editor
• Roger D. Woodard, Editor

This issue does not mark the first occasion on which an examination of Greek musical structure and tragedy has been taken up within the covers of Arethusa. There is, for example, Claire Catenaccio’s 2017 “Sudden Song: The Musical Structure of Sophocles’ Trachiniae” (50.1, pp. 1–33), a work with which Anna Conser herein engages directly. But “Musical Structure in Greek Tragedy” does represent a first for Arethusa—a single issue centered on the theme of Greek music, with a set of inquiries dedicated fully to taking a close look at the musical structures that characterize the performance of tragedy in the Greek theater. I want to express my deepest appreciation to Timothy Moore for his expert guidance as guest editor of “Musical Structure in Greek Tragedy”–and to Tim and to each of the other contributors—Anna Conser, Armand D’Angour, Helene Foley, John Franklin, Toph Marshall—for lending their remarkable expertise to this endeavor. The idea for such a special thematic issue of Arethusa is one that initially emerged out of a pair of symposia that were held in honor of John J. Peradotto, Emeritus Raymond Professor of the Classics at the University of Buffalo and long-time editor of this journal (1975–1997). Those celebratory symposia were made possible by a generous gift provided by Milton Ezrati, who as an undergraduate majoring in Economics at the University of Buffalo in the late 1960s had studied with Jack Peradotto. I want also to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Milton Ezrati for his continuing support of the Classics discipline in all of its various aspects. [End Page 1]

Abstract:

This article situates the amoebaeon Agamemnon 1407–1576 within the musical structure of the play. Employing a criterion of interpretability in performance, it demonstrates how even the most complex choral and musical passages remain interpretable when a play is experienced linearly in performance. The amoebaeon, as preserved, is not interpretable however: the repetition of the second ephymnion (lines 1513–20) is intrusive, and it prevents the audience from appreciating Aeschylus’s musical structure. Further, lines 1513–20 do not conform to Aeschylus’s use of refrains elsewhere. Interpretability is restored if this passage is deleted.

Abstract:

In the original performance of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, song and dance were essential in communicating dramatic theme and character. Tragic choreia is structurally defined by paired stanzas: the antistrophe repeats the melody of the strophe but reverses its direction of dance. In Trachiniae, this antistrophic structure becomes thematic, representing the fateful bond between Deianeira and Heracles and the resulting narrative repetitions/reversals. Digital analysis of pitch accents reveals that this musical metaphor was reinforced melodically through the development of a “shimmering” circumflex motif, culminating in Heracles’ melismatic monody. Through this musical framing, Sophocles situates his tragedy in relation to other genres (epic, paean) and to musical developments in the fifth century.

Abstract:

This paper discusses compositional methods and interpretive choices behind “new ancient music” for Euripides’ Helen, how it supports or complicates the play’s musical design as previously understood, and how a newly musicalized “choral plot” can affect audience experience, ancient and modern. It is intended to complement performance recordings and scores, materials which, taken together, may help one understand the ancient experience of Greek dramatic music generally, or to evaluate musical effects of this specific play. It may also be useful for restaging Helen with this music, or new compositions of one’s own.

Abstract:

This paper addresses the apparent absence of a systematic analysis of Epicureanism in Foucault's exploration of ancient philosophy. By considering Pierre Hadot's remark concerning Foucault's problematic neglect of the Epicurean notion of hēdonē, it revisits Foucault's work in search of traces of his engagement with Epicureanism. It then goes on to analyze the genesis of the notion of parrhēsia in Foucault's work, showing how it first appears and is developed in a series of analyses of the "philosophy of the garden," first in a reading of Epicurus's view on the study of nature in the Vatican Sayings, second in his study of Philodemus's Peri Parrhēsias. It is precisely in a series of readings of the Epicurean school that Foucault finds one of his key theoretical resources guiding his study of ancient philosophical practices in the 1980s. More importantly, the paper seeks to articulate the ways in which the analysis of parrhēsia—and of the Epicureans in particular—is situated in a broader genealogy of confession, which connects Foucault's studies of ancient philosophy to his readings of Christianity and the formation of the modern technologies of power and veridiction, defining aspects of the earlier project of a History of Sexuality, as announced in the Will to Knowledge. Finally, the paper articulates a possible view on the critical import of parrhēsia in this broader genealogy of confession.

Abstract:

This article examines Foucault's Le Souci de soi: while purporting to be a work on sexuality, it is also about the formation of the self and the relationship of subjectivity with claims to truth. I argue that Foucault's use of imperial Greek medical and technical texts connected the ancient world to his own background in the history of medicine and psychoanalysis. By reading medical and technical texts both on sexuality and on selfhood, Foucault examined not just what philosophy dictated about these topics but how its ideologies of sexuality and self were—in practice—translated into adjacent fields of knowledge.