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mental solos. We know that he broke the conventions regarding choral odes by substituting songs that were mere interludes and had nothing to do with the play. Other dramatists took up the practice.130 |
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There is less to say about the music of fifth-century comedy. It was mainly choral or shared by the chorus with one or two actors. Solo arias are exceptional except where tragedy or other serious music is being parodied. The chorus was larger than that of tragedy, having twenty-four members. The accompanist was again an aulete. |
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The songs are mostly comparatively simple in rhythms and structureagain, except in tragic parody.131 They clearly represent a more popular level of music. Sometimes they give us a distinct impression of genuine forms of popular song, for example in the wedding hymns at the end of Peace and Birds and the amorous serenades in Ecclesiazusae (893ff.). On modes, genera, etc., we have no information. |
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Recitative in iambic, trochaic, and anapaestic metres appears to have played a more extensive role than in tragedy.132 A recurrent and evidently traditional feature of Old Comedy is the so-called 'epirrhematic syzygy', in which a sung strophe and antistrophe are each followed by an equal number of trochaic tetrameters, either sixteen or twenty. These must have been in recitative, and the standardization in their number of lines probably reflects a stereo-typed dance sequence. |
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130 Plut. Quaest. conv. 645e, Psell. De trag 5; Ar. Thesm. 68, 100 ff.. fr. 178: Arist. Poet 1456d29. (TrGF 39 F 3a, T 20c, 21. 20ab, 18.) |
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131 The rhythms are usually iambic or iambo-choriambic, trochaic, paeonic, aeolic, or anapaestic. |
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132 For discussion of how extensive see Pickard-Cambridge. DFA2 156-65. |
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