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catch on. What we do find occasionallyand in comedy more oftenis that a strophic melody that has been heard once recurs at a later point in the play.49 |
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It may be conjectured that the musical logic of the open strophe was analogous to what has been indicated for the closed one, with a distinction of less and more final-sounding cadences at the various pauses in the structure. The only particle of direct evidence is offered by the Orestes papyrus. The music, so far as it is visible, circles round two tonal foci a fifth apart, and we are able to see that one period within the strophe came to rest on the upper of the twoor perhaps the lower.50 We should guess that the strophe as a whole ended on the lower one in view of the general tendency of Greek music observed on p. 193. |
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Non-repetitive music, not confined by stichic or strophic organization but evolving continuously, appears to have originated not in the vocal but in the instrumental sphere. In song there are always new words when the music repeats. But when an instrumental soloist gives a performance, there is no point in his repeating the same melody several times over without change. One alternative would be variation formrepeating it with different embellishments and modifications each timebut we have no evidence for this in Antiquity. What we do hear of is a sort of programme music, extended pieces telling a story and evoking particular scenes by means of instrumental effects. |
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It was in the early sixth century BC, in the great pipers' competition at the Pythian Games, that the genre came into being, or at any rate into prominence. Sakadas of Argos, who won the prize at each of the first three contests, in 586, 582, and 578, was remembered as the pioneer of what became a traditional set-piece, the Pythikos nomos. This portrayed in music the central religious myth of the Pythian sanctuary, Apollo's defeat of the monstrous serpent that had beset the place before his arrival. It is not clear whether later pipers played it in anything like a fixed form or produced their own versions |
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49 The recurrence of the melody is of course an inference from the recurrence of the metrical scheme. For the details of these various arrangements see Greek Metre, 79f. |
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50 A line of the text is unfortunately out of sequence at this point, and the question at issue depends on whether the associated note-series is also displaced. |
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