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mens of his work, including musical portions.105 One imagines that the authorities favoured proven talent, promising plots, and music that was not too alarming. As we have mentioned, where musical originality was concerned, dithyramb and the citharodic nomos led and tragedy followed. The tragedian had to have some musical competence, since he was his own melodist and commonly his own choreographer and chorus-trainer, besides being in the earlier period one of the principal actors.106 But poetic, rhetorical, and dramatic skills were on the whole more important for success. |
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The musical elements consisted of (a) songs for the chorus, mostly strophic;107 (b) songs, again mostly strophic, in which the chorus and an actor, or the chorus and two actors, sang in turn; (c) after the middle of the fifth century, and increasingly towards its end, solo arias, mostly astrophic; (d) certain passages recited (by chorus or actors) with instrumental accompaniment;108 (e) short instrumental sections in amongst the songs.109 Not all actors were required to sing. Many parts are written in such a way as to dispense them. The chorus numbered twelve in Aeschylus' time, but later fifteen. The instrumental accompaniment was provided by a single aulete.110 It had elements of heterophony, at any rate by the end of the fifth century. |
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The music of the older tragedians, so we are told, was either of the enharmonic genus or enharmonic with an admixture of diatonic. Agathon or Euripides was the first to use the chromatic.111 We hear also that the earlier tragedians used 'small' scale-systems, Euripides being the first to use polychordia, many notes; the older style was known as anatretos, 'perforated', or as we should say, 'gapped'.112 The meaning may be that the enharmonic of early classical tragedy |
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105 See Pickard-Cambridge, DFA2 84. |
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106 Ibid. 84-6, 93, 130f. On the early tragedians as dance-masters see Ath. 21e-22a. |
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107 For the form and arrangement of the strophes see pp. 211f. |
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108 See p. 40. In some cases this parakataloge alternated with sung sections in symmetrical strophic structures. |
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109Mesauli(k)on or diaulion, Psell. De trag. 9, cf. Aristid. Quint. p. 23. 21, Hsch. d 1417, Phot. Lex. d 478-9, Eust. Il. 862. 19. It is not clear how early this existed. |
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110 Beazley. Hesp. 24 (1955), 305-19 (vases); Pickard-Cambridge, DFA2 165-7. Other instruments might appear occasionally as appropriate to particular characters or situations. Thus a mythical singer such as Orpheus, Thamyras, or Amphion could carry a lyre and sing to it. Hypsipyle accompanies her song to the baby Opheltes with krotala (Eur. Hyps. p. 26 Bond), and the Bacchants are equipped with drums (Ba. 58f., 124, 156). |
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111 Plut. Quaest. conv. 645 e (TrGF 39 F 3a); Psell. De trag. 5. |
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112 Psell. loc. cit. |
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