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up and down the octave c-c' and landing on the a. In the short third line there is an abrupt lurch back into the original mode, duly ending on e. |
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These little songs are late in date, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that the strophes of Sappho and Anacreon obeyed similar canons of finality and non-finality, with half-cadences off the tonic and full cadences either on it or falling from it to the fourth below. |
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The other category of strophe, the 'open' kind, was characteristic of the Dorian tradition of choral and narrative lyric and became naturalized at Athens as a feature of dithyramb and tragedy. This kind of strophe is larger and more complex than the other. It may extend over five, ten, or fifteen lines of writing. But these lines of writing seldom correspond to distinct, metrically stereotyped verses. The strophe is built up from a number of periods (defined by the occurrence of pauses, which are themselves defined by metrical criteria), which may be of as few as four syllables or of more than forty. Sometimes they are easily analysed in terms of familiar metrical units; sometimes one can only assign the strophe to a general rhythmic category such as aeolic, but not find labels to hand for the definition of the component verses. The poets develop and embroider them as they compose, creating new mutations out of what has gone before.48 The 'open' strophe was never, so far as we know, used for more than one composition. It was always a unique, original creation. |
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Such strophes represent ample musical paragraphs, too long to be called tunes. But in many cases there was an even larger structural unit. Stesichorus, Pindar, and others in their times often used the triadic system, in which two strophes sung to the same music were followed by a third, the 'epode', that had a different metrical scheme and melody; the whole sequence was then repeated as many times as required, AAB AAB AAB . . . Most (possibly all) of this triadic poetry was sung by dancers or as accompaniment to them, so that the arrangement had both a musical and a choreographic significance. |
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In tragedy no strophic melody was repeated more than once. A single triad might occur, but the preferred arrangement was AA BB CC . . . Aeschylus in his Choephoroe produces elaborate interlacings of strophes, ABA CDC EFE and the like, but this did not |
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48 Cf. my Greek Metre, 63-8. |
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