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Aeschylus' odes sometimes represent types of song that might be sung in real-life situations: ritual or incantatory hymns, formal laments accompanied by breast-beating and other gestures of mourning, and so forth. There are stylistic features such as antiphonal verbal responsion, solemn interjections, refrains, that may reflect the conventions of ritual songs. The music too may have echoed them. In the Persians Aeschylus may have sought to give some of the songs an Asiatic flavour. The chorus refer to their own 'barbarian cries' and to their wailing that will be like that of a Marian-dynian dirger, while Xerxes calls upon them to vociferate in Mysian fashion.120 |
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Sophocles gave the music of tragedy a wider range by admitting modalities more familiar in other genres. It may be that no special flash of genius was required for such developments, and that musical styles naturally tended to spread across concurrent genres and blur their individualities. Sophocles' rhythms were also more varied and complex. Here too we may see the influence of non-theatrical music. For example, the dactylo-epitrite type of metre, much used by such poets as Pindar and Bacchylides, but not, so far as we know, by Aeschylus, comes to be quite at home in Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedy. |
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Aristophanes lists 'songs by Sophocles' among the pleasures of the festival,121 and he clearly preferred Sophocles' music to Euripides'. In the Frogs he makes Aeschylus accuse Euripides of gathering his lyrics from anywhere and everywhere: 'from tarts' songs, party songs by Meletus, Carian aulos airs, dirges, festive choral dances'.122 There follows, to a vulgar, clacking accompaniment (see p. 123), a delightful parody of a choral ode in Euripides' late styleif only we had the music!with the comment that it is composed on the twelve-resourceful-variations principle of Cyrene, who was a versatile fille de joie of the time. It looks as if this refers at least in part to metrical variations, as attention is drawn to two glyconic measures of unusual form. But there is probably also a melodic reference that we cannot appreciate. Then comes an equally brilliant parody of a Euripidean |
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(Footnote continued from previous page) |
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orthios nomos' (cf. Aesch. Ag. 1153). This was a citharodic nomos ascribed to Terpander (Poll. 4.65. ps.-Plut. De mus. 1140f, Suda i. 151.30. iii. 477. 15 = Phot. s.v. nomos); cf. Hdt. 1. 24. 5 (Arion). |
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120Pers. 635, 939, 1054. Cf. W. Kranz, Stasimon (Berlin, 1933), 127-42. |
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121Pax 531. |
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122Ran. 1301-3. Meletus was known for erotic songs (Epicrates fr. 4). Carian aulos pieces belong in the same sphere, cf. above, p. 349. |
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