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and primitive singing is unnatural and seasoned with strange, unwonted mannerisms. |
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However, I suspect that this statement reflects a somewhat excessive reaction to the Europocentric outlook of older writers. Singing styles the world over have since been analysed in great detail by the American musicologist Alan Lomax. He finds that they characterize large geographical and historical regions, zones thousands of miles broad and millennia deep. He claims to establish that they show a marked correlation with features of social organization, especially with the type of economy, male dominance, and the repression of female sexuality.22 The variables include vocal width and tension, raspiness, gutturality, tremolo, nasality, emphasis, tempo, volume, pitch level in relation to the singer's natural range, amount and type of ornamentation, strictness of intonation and rhythm, precision of enunciation, and, where there are several voices, the degree of blending. |
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The commendatory adjective most regularly applied to the singing voice in Greek is ligys or ligyros. It is also applied to the lyre, the aulos, panpipes, bird-calls, the stridulation of cicadas, the wind, people weeping, a smooth-tongued orator, and to pliant, swishy things such as whips and the tails of hounds. A scientific writer defines the ligyra voice as one that is 'refined and concentrated, like those of cicadas, grasshoppers, and nightingales, and in general all those voices that are refined and have no alien noise accompanying them: it is not a matter of volume, or of low, relaxed tone, or of contact between sounds, but rather of high tone, refinement, and precision'.23 We had better not try to extract too much from this. The Greek singer fairly certainly did not endeavour to sound like a grasshopper, though a symposiast does apologize for not being able to 'sing liga, like a nightingale', because he was carousing the previous night too.24 The essential quality expressed by ligys seems to be clarity and purity of sound, free from roughness or huskiness. |
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Other indications are consistent with this. Aeschylus imagines Iphigeneia singing the paean for her father's dinner guests 'virginal, pure-voiced'. Aristophanes' Hoopoe praises the 'clean' sound of the |
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22 A. Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington, DC, 1968). Cf. Kunst, 12 with literature; Nettl, FTM 19, 47f.; Sachs, WM, 85-91; W. Wiora, Ergebnisse und Aufgaben vergleichender Musikforschung (Darmstadt, 1975), 44f. |
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23 Ps.-Arist. De audibilibus 804 21. |
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24 'Theog.' 939f. |
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