Abigail Akavia, Asymmetry in Sophocles: the case of Oedipus at Colonus
This paper concerns metrical patterns in the lyric dialogues of Sophocles. It looks especially at moments where the meter is unpredictable or dis-harmonious. Sung dialogues, it has been argued, have a special dramatic relevance to the plot. I suggest that it is precisely through the vocal and sonic aspects of these lyric dialogues-in-song that the drama unfolds, and that moments of asymmetry reflect and create particularly poignant interactions between the singing characters onstage.
The paper focuses on the parodos of Oedipus at Colonus. Since Hermann’s 1824 edition, most scholars assume a lacuna and suggest emendations to restore exact responsion between the second strophe and antistrophe of the song. A few have argued that the transmitted text is sound, and that instead of corresponding strophes we should think of “two parts that have much in common”. While such a non-corresponding lyric structure would be rare in tragedy, I offer some additional considerations to support the transmitted text, arguing that the lack of exact responsion can be understood as dramatically purposeful. The formal difference between the two parts of the song enhances the emotionally charged interaction between Oedipus, Antigone and the chorus, and highlights Oedipus’ idiosyncratic use of his voice. In particular, Oedipus’ exclamations draw attention to his body as the object of Antigone’s care, thus projecting on the chorus a demand for empathy. This deviation from the metrical pattern is a response to the chorus’ mention of ἄφιλον, a description that fits the outcast, defiled Oedipus all too well. The threat that the chorus will reject Oedipus once they learn his identity and recognize that he actually is ἄφιλος, is preemptively met by turning the focus to the physical and vocal aspects of his presence. This focus comes about in and through the metrically unexpected lines of the (so called) antistrophe.
Amy Cohen, Making Masks Sing: Insights for Ancient Practice from Modern
Greek theatrical masks had many practical benefits: they made characters visible and distinct quickly, even over the large distances of the Theater of Dionysus; they aided in the acoustics of the performance and helped voices carry and be heard in any direction; and they made it possible for one actor to make quick changes into multiple characters. Those benefits, however, do not fully answer the question of why ancient Greek actors wore masks.The experience of seven original-practices productions in full Greek helmet masks has led to conclusions about the operation and usefulness of Greek theatrical masks. Even an amateur actor in a poorly made mask allows us to see the emotions on the face of the mask because we know—when we hear that voice, see that posture, hear those words—the face that goes with those emotional cues. The fact that audiences see the mask “change” with emotions relies, though, on the fact that audiences of masked Greek drama are ready for more than passively witnessing an illusion: those audiences actively do the work with the actor of bringing a whole person to life in the orchestra.
When vase painters depicted the plays, they painted the characters without any evidence of the masks, a phenomenon we call “the melting effect.” The melting effect means that for the original audience the masks became the faces of the characters, not masks on the actors. This lack of tension and the melting away of the mask as something separate is a testament to the skill of the actors and of the maskmakers, of course.
The playwrights relied equally, however, on the skill of the audience. The answer to the question, “why masks for the Greeks,” is that the masks engage the audience’s skill of imagining. For audiences watching Greek drama, consciousness of the masks melts away after only a few minutes, and that suggests an unmediated engagement between the audience and the actors in the orchestra, and a kind of imaginative participation by the audience in the creation of characters and emotions.
The masks, obstacles that our perceptions must encounter and overcome, become a training ground for our imaginations. We, the audience, do the work of the play by using our imaginations to see the masks change expression when the characters change moods. That creation of real people, a joint effort of the performers and the audience through the vehicle of the masks, is the remarkable innovation of Greek drama.
John Franklin, The Wise Crocodiles: A New Citharodic Melodrama of Euripides’ Helen
I will present and discuss selections from the “new ancient music” I am composing for a production of Euripides Helen in Burlington, Vermont, March 22–25, 2018 (for the first Ambrose Classical Play). For practical reasons I have had to use a replica kithara for this project (hence the title). I will describe the parameters that guided the composition, including interpretation of the ancient meters; translation into metrically equivalent English; the tunings I used, why, and what I learned from applying descriptions of ancient lyric technique to the compositional process, as well as practical considerations for onstage performance; use of tonal / modal coloration for different moods in the text; etc.
Mary-Kay Gamel, Greek Drama: a Musical Theater
Music was a crucial part of ancient drama performance in antiquity, and Greek tragedy was the inspiration for the creation of opera in sixteenth-century Europe. However, few contemporary productions of ancient drama include music. This omission is very significant. Music adds a crucial dimension to drama, offering actors different modes of expression and audiences different ranges of response and understanding.In Sophocles’ Elektra, for example, in her opening words Elektra describes herself singing “like the nightingale bereft of her young” (107); when the chorus approaches singing, she responds to them in song (121-250); when Orestes’ (false) death is announced she bursts into song (823-870), and does so again when Orestes reveals himself to her (1232-1287). Yet I have never seen a production of this often-staged play in which Electra actually sang, and the shows suffered from that omission.
The most obvious reason for not including music is financial: composers and musicians need to be paid. Assuming that financial support is available, what kind of music is appropriate for different performance genres? I will discuss, with video examples, some of my productions of Greek tragedy and comedy which use different kinds of music, evaluating the benefits and problems involved. The examples may include a 1998 Prometheus, a 2008 Helen, a 2011 Orestes, and a 2015 Ekklesiazousai. I hope that my remarks will contribute to a broader understanding of the effect of music in the reception of ancient drama both in scholarship and in performance.
Sean Gurd, Compound Emotions and the Music of Tragedy
A consistent element in the theoretical reception of Attic tragedy was the idea that it provoked a complex combination of conflicting emotions: Gorgias commented on the remarkable fact that viewers of tragedy seemed to derive pleasure from the spectacle of suffering, and Aristotle, most famously, based his analytic of the form in the idea that it provoked the twin emotions of pity and fear. My paper aims to suggest that an important element to this tradition was the analysis of the musical composition of tragedy. After identifying a few musical analogies to the theory of compound emotions in the Hippocratic corpus and in Plato, I turn to Aristoxenus , who interpreted the music of tragedy as a consequence of the combination of modes with distinct ethical flavors. After setting Aristoxenus’ remarks in their original theoretical context (likely his doctrine of melopoeia), I suggest that his hypothesis opens on an alternative view of fifth- and sixth-century music in which “modulation,” far from being a component introduced by the latest and most innovative generation of composers and playwrights, was wired into the design of tragic form, possibly from its beginnings in the reorganized festival of the late sixth century.
Tim Moore, Meter, Music, and Power in Euripides’ Medea
In his Medea, Euripides uses musical patterns to reinforce the degree to which his title character controls the play’s plot. Medea, uniquely, begins the play’s music by singing anapests from offstage, and anapests return throughout the play to remind spectators of this initial surprise. In choruses, contrast between aeolics and dactylo-epitrites reflects the struggle between Medea and Jason and the failure of any characters to control Medea’s action. The slaughter of Medea’s children brings the music to a peak of excitement with dochmiacs and then stops the music altogether. Euripides’ use of music to underline Medea’s power anticipates musical patterns in Medea plays of Carcinus and several Roman playwrights.
Richard Neer, Statues, Songs and Sites: Some Preludes to Pindar
This paper derives from a longer study of Pindar and Greek spatiality. It concerns the interaction of song and sculpture in articulation and navigation of space in Archaic and Classical Greece. The gist of the argument is that, lacking any consistent unit of linear measurement, as well as basic technologies of spatial representation (e.g., maps), the Greeks used song, sculpture and architecture to conceptualize and make use of space in multiple reference frames (local, regional, global). The discussion starts with some general observations about how statues and songs could articulate relations of propinquity and distance, and thereby organize spaces and places. It then works through some cases. Choral lyric is the most obvious example of a poetic genre that could play these roles, insofar as it was performed by ambient singers moving in measured time through public spaces. The emphasis here, however, is equally on epic and epigram, always in relation to real-world mnêmata and agalmata. Examples will range from Olympia and Athens to less well known spots like Thasos and the Milesian hinterland.
Tim Power, Diegetic Music in Tragedy
My paper considers the phenomenon of diegetic music in tragic drama, that is to say, musical performances in the orchestra and on the skene that are represented as actually happening in the mythical story world of the tragedy, and thus distinct from choral and solo songs that are nondiegetic, heard as music only by the theatrical audience. What can the staging of diegetic (or “source” or “realistic”) music tell us about the ontology of tragedy’s music as a whole, its (evolving) role in the composition and experience of the form? What might it add to our understanding of tragedy’s play with diegesis and mimesis, myth and ritual, past and present?
Jon Solomon, Giovanni Pacini’s Saffo:
A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Attempt at Reviving Ancient Greek Music
Although the creation of opera was primarily the result of innovative applications of ancient Greek music and theory at the end of the sixteenth century, although the format of early operas depended extensively, if inaccurately, on Aristotle’s description of ancient Greek tragedy, and although several thousand operas feature ancient Greco-Roman myths, Greco-Roman historical figures, and events described in ancient Greco-Roman literature, very few operatic composers ever attempted to set librettos in an ancient Greek musical idiom.This paper surveys attempts at applying ancient Greek music theory and recreating ancient Greek tragedies from the inception of the operatic genre in the 1590s to the 1830s—including the research and productions by the members of the Florentine Camerata, the palliated tragic productions written by Italian poets in the wake of the late seventeenth-century Arcadian movement, the mid-eighteenth century revivals of Euripides’ Alcestis and Iphigeneia plays, and the post-Revolutionary productions that contained genuine tragic endings. Then I will concentrate on the forty year-old Giovanni Pacini, who finding his career plateaued, attempted to compose in ancient Greek musical idiom his setting of Salvadore Cammarano’s Saffo but ultimately abandoned that aspect of the project.
Naomi Weiss, Music and pathos in Aeschylean tragedy
In antiquity Aeschylus was well known for the violently affective power of his choral performances. This paper looks for indications within the tragedies themselves that the music and dance that were such important parts of their performance were meant to disturb the audience. I first survey a range of passages from Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides, in which metrical effects and metamusical language (language that describes music-making at the same time as music is performed) reinforce the emotional and physical impact of a song. I then focus on Suppliants, a play which has a greater proportion of choral song than any other surviving tragedy. I show how the musical performance of this play would immerse its audience in an emotionally fraught drama, guiding their responses so that they feel the full force of the suppliants’ position at each stage of the plot. This process is most clearly at work in the parodos, in which the chorus essentially tell us how to react to their song. But the most affective moment of the tragedy comes in the fourth stasimon, when two choruses together produce music of disturbance, fear, and violence. By exploring the range of musical effects in this play, I demonstrate that the tragic stage was already a site for extensive musical experimentation some time before the “New Music” of the later fifth century.