Thursday, February 27, 2014
Leedy on Singing Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek musical practice has been a constant, and often almost obsessive, presence in western compositional thought and practice. "Re-imaging" the performance of Greek Drama has provided a spark igniting the invention of European Opera and reinvigorating it at intervals in forms only distantly related to their origins, from Monteverdi to Gluck to Berlioz and Wagner and to such disparate later figures as Richard Strauss, Carl Orff or Harry Partch. On the other hand, modern poets look comfortably back to Homer and Hesiod or Sappho and Archilochus, but they look back to them as producers of words, usually neglecting the fact that those words were originally performed with tones and rhythms by singing voices. There has been particularly intense work in the past two decades or so on Ancient Greek music, both its theory and practice. We have a small corpus of surviving notated music, representing a range of repertoires and lively controversy has followed its interpretation. The bulk of existing Ancient Greek music, however, is represented by epic, lyric, and dramatic texts without musical pitch notation. This does not mean that the music has been lost altogether, however, as we know the metres of these texts and much of the rhythmic detail within these metres can be reconstructed from the patterns of long and short quantities inherent in the language. Ancient Greek was also a language with pitch accents, and these may well have played a role in the composition of the melodies (although there is also considerable evidence that poets and dramatists also composed melodies that went against these pitch accents, with both pitch and rhythmic usage contrary to natural contours presumably used for the striking effect they would create.) The composer and scholar Douglas Leedy (who goes by the name Bhisma Xenotechnites) has summarized his own work in re-imagining the practice in a monograph on Singing Ancient Greek, which has now been made available on the eScholarship page of the UC Berkeley Department of Classics, here.