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mimetic effects, things difficult for a non-professional chorus to put across.59 As the melody was not bound to a recurring strophic scheme, it could be shaped throughout to express every pictorial aspect or emotional nuance of the words. |
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Like the Pythikos nomos, the citharodic nomos fell into conventionally recognized sections. Pollux enumerates seven, supposedly established by Terpander: beginning, after-the-beginning, down-turn(?), after-the-down-turn, navel, seal, and epilogue.60 The names are not very informative, and we do not know how strictly the scheme was observed by those who understood it. In the only specimen of the genre of which we have a substantial portion, Timotheus' Persians, we can certainly see a well-marked transition from the main narrative to a closing section that might suitably be described as a 'seal' (in that Timotheus establishes his ownership of the composition by speaking of himself) and/or an epilogue. The work began with a hexameter or hexameters, the main part is in a mixture of iambic and various other rhythms, and the concluding section is pure aeolic. |
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The two Delphic Paeans owe something to the style of the citharodic nome. They are free astrophic compositions, each falling into several clearly distinct musical paragraphs. Most of these end on the tonic or a fifth above it or a fourth below. There are various shifts of tonal focus in the course of each work. Both refer to Apollo's killing of the serpent and to the dying creature's hisses, with a presumably mimetic melodic inflection on the word syrigma. Limenius' paean has a change of rhythm to aeolic in its concluding prayer, much like what we have just noted in Timotheus, but apart from that both paeans are in uniform paeonic rhythm. |
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The term nomos has been appearing in the last couple of pages. It calls for some further commentary. Poets use the word in a non-technical way, of any melody with a definite identity or character: the songs of different birds, a mourner's song, the various songs in a |
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59 See ps.-Arist. Pr. 19. 15, discussing the question why nomoi are not strophic like choral songs. |
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60 Poll. 4. 66: archa, metarcha, katatropa, metakatatropa, omphalos, sphragis, epilogos. Aelius Dionysius a 76 refers to a 'going-out' section at the end (exodion, like the exodos of a tragedy), introduced by a farewell salutation to the god. Cf. U. yon Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Timotheos. Die Perser (Leipzig, 1903), 96-100. |
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