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way the natural rhythm of the words, with their built-in opposition of longer and shorter durations. To a certain extent melody too had a basis in an intrinsic feature of the language. From the earliest times Greek had a tonal accent. In every word (except for certain particles, prepositions, conjunctions, and a handful of others) there was one syllable which was given prominence over the others, not by stress as in English (and modern Greek) but by raised pitch. The Greeks interpreted the phenomenon in musical terms. They called it 'singing along', prosoidia, which the Romans translated as ad-cantus, accentus. They applied to it the same vocabulary of high/low, tension/ relaxation, as they did to melodic pitch, and they could even speak of its 'attunement', harmonia.12 Aristoxenus lays it down that it is movement by definite intervals that distinguishes musical melody from that of speech, 'for there is said to be a kind of melody of speech too, the one constituted by the word-accents'.13 The differences of pitch in this speech-melody were conspicuous. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the time of Augustus, they amounted to approximately a fifth.14 |
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When such a language was set to music and sung, one might expect that the verbal accent, as an essential and inalienable feature of words, serving in some cases to distinguish one meaning or grammatical form from another, would be respected by the melodic line, just as each word's metrical shape was respected in the metre of the song. This relationship often exists in the music of other countries where tonal languages are spoken, for example in China, where the melody of many songs 'is but an exaggeration of the tonal accents', and in Uganda.15 |
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The evidence of the Greek musical documents is that the accent was indeed respected to a large extent in non-strophic compositions, where the melody did not have to repeat with different sets of words but was 'through-composed', designed for a unique text. But in strophic compositions, such as the majority of choral odes in tragedy, correspondence of accents and melody could only have been achieved if each strophe sung to a given melody had been so composed as to have the same pattern of word accents. So far as we |
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12 Anon. Dissoi logoi 5. 11, Arist. Rh. 1403b31. Cf. W. S. Allen. Vox Graeca, 3rd edn. (Cambridge, 1987), 116. |
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13Harm. 1. 18; cf. Dion. Hal. Comp. 57f., 64f., Cic. Orat. 57. |
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14Comp. 58-62; cf. Allen, op. cit., 120f. |
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15 L. Picken in E. Wellesz (ed.), Ancient and Oriental Music, 113; Sachs, WM 35-8; Nettl, FTM 138f. |
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