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can see, this was never attempted. Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarks on the disagreements of accent and melody in the first words of the first song in Euripides' most popular drama, Orestes.16 In the papyrus fragment that gives us a little of the music to a later ode in the same play, we find that it matches the accentual pattern neither of the strophe nor of the antistrophe. There is partial agreement, sometimes with the one, sometimes with the other, but accord is not a principle of the composition.17 It is reasonable to suppose that other dramatic fragments in which the melody shows no particular regard for the word accents were originally strophic.18 |
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Where the accent is respected, the respect is expressed in the following principles: |
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1. The accented syllable is given a note at least as high as any other in the same word.19 Often, especially in polysyllabic words, it is set at the summit of a rising and falling figure. |
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2. A syllable bearing a circumflex accent (which represents a high pitch followed by a fall, and can only occur on a long vowel or diphthong) is often set on two notes of which the first is the higher. |
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3. When the accent falls on the final syllable of a word, and is not circumflex, and not succeeded by a grammatical pause, then the melody does not fall again until after the next accent. |
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It is in the Delphic Paeans that these rules are observed most consistently, though even there one or two breaches occur. In other texts practice is a little freer, particularly, perhaps, as regards the third rule.20 There is some reason to suspect that it becomes freer the later the composition, though with several of the papyri we cannot be sure whether the composition was of the same age as the papyrus or |
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16Comp. 63f. He omits to mention that the song is strophic. |
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17 See, however, D. D. Feaver, AJPhil. 81 (1960), 7-15, who argues that there is a more than casual degree of correspondence, especially in the strophe. |
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18 This applies to the Zeno Archive fragment, parts of the Vienna fragments, and the Berlin Ajax (7, 8, 42; Trag. Adesp. (TrGF) 678, 679, 683). |
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19 Similarly a sample of songs of the Ibo in Nigeria suggests 'that the musical pitch sometimes moves up and down in the same direction as the pitch in speech, and that it sometimes remains the same while the speech tones change, but that pitch movement in the music is hardly ever contrary to that of the language' (Nettl, FTM 139; cf. his Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (New York, 1964), 290 f.). |
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20 Winnington-Ingram, Symb. Osl. 31 (1955), 64-73, gives a careful and detailed account of the evidence known up to that date; one additional fragment was known to Pöhlmann, Griechische Musikfragmente, 26-9. It is to be noted that a number of the violations cited from Mesomedes disappear in the improved edition by Pöhlmann in his 1970 corpus. |
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