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(Music lulls the fierce eagle of Zeus)
Your dark cloud settles over his hook-nosed head
gently to shutter his eyelids, and he, snoring,
rhythms his rippling back.23 |
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The same onomatopoeic word for 'snore, slumber', knosso is likewise stretched out by Simonides in a fragment where it is actually written knooss- ( ). He is also cited for doing something similar with the word for fire, pyr, making it disyllabic, pyyr. We may guess that the music at this point was shaped to suggest the flickering flames.24 |
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A related device is reflected in Aristophanes' delicious parody of Euripidean lyrics, where he twice writes the verb heilisso 'twirl' as heieieieieilisso (the manuscripts are at variance on the exact number of eis).25 In the Hellenistic papyri and inscriptions with musical notation a long vowel or diphthong is written double when it is divided between two notes; no increase in duration (as in the two Simonides instances) is implied or indeed admissible in these cases. So the Aristophanes passage suggests a multipleprobably in fact no more than a tripledivision as a novelty of modern lyrics: not as a general-purpose ornament, but in association with a particular word and as a melodic comment on the word's meaning. Imitative expressionism was a feature of the new music of the period.26 |
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In the Delphic Paeans, nearly three centuries later, we still find clear examples. In both compositions, at mention of the twin peaks of Parnassus, the melody duly makes two peaks in the upper part of the scale (in one case against the word accent). The words 'shimmering tunes' are set to a shimmering musical phrase:  . The flickering of the altar flames is likewise evoked (cf. above on Simonides) in Example 7.2. |
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23 Simon. PMG 521, 581, Pind. Pyth. 1.7f. |
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24PMG 543.9, 587; cf. ZPE 37 (1980) 153-5. |
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25Ran. 1314, 1348. |
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26 See Ch. 12. |
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