Later Euripidean Music
1999; University of Illinois Press; Issue: 24 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2328-5265
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoIn the last two decades of the twentieth century several important general books marked a resurgence of interest in Greek music: Barker 1984 and 1989, Comotti 1989a (an expanded English translation of a work in Italian written in 1979), M. L. West 1992, W. D. Anderson 1994, Neubecker 1994 (second edition of a work of 1977), and Landels 1999. These volumes provide good general guides to the subject, with particular strengths in ancient theory and practice, the history of genres, technical innovations, the reconstruction and use of ancient instruments, ancient notation, documents, metrics, and reconstructions of ancient scales, modes, and genera. They are too broadly focussed to give much attention to tragedy. Euripidean music receives no more than three pages in any of these works (a little more is usually allocated to specific discussion of the fragment of Orestes). Fewer books were devoted to music in drama. Even stretching back another decade, we have: one general book on tragic music, Pintacuda 1978, two books by Scott on musical design in Aeschylus (1984) and in Sophocles (1996), and two books devoted to Aristophanes' music, Pintacuda 1982 and L. P. E. Parker 1997. Pintacuda 1978 offers three chapters on basic background, and one chapter for each of the poets. The chapter on Euripides (shared with a fairly standard account of the New Musicians), contains less than four pages of general discussion of Euripides' relationship to the New Music (164-68), which is followed by fifty pages of blow-by-blow description of the numbers in each play—a mildly caffeinated catalogue-style already familiar from Webster 1970b: 110-92 and revisited by Scott. Despite the ostensible focus on song or musical design in dramatic music, these works are mainly concerned with metrics, taxonomy, and questions of function within the dramatic narrative, all of which, though relevant, are not the same thing as design. Also highly relevant to Euripides' music is the massive study of the
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