9. … The Pudding: The Drama of Music1
How does one demonstrate that a musical text … is musical? It was one thing to demonstrate that the Linear B script was actually a representation of an historical stage of Greek. The decoded product was recognisable as Greek words and sentences, without gibberish. While this was not true about other language candidates, the proof was not thereby achieved through a process of elimination; there was, rather, a positive identification, where Greek answered the decipherment internally with morphology and meaning, as well as recognisable proper names. It is also the case that the East Roman manuscripts preserve the location of the onset of Greek’s historical tonal contonation, and I have shown that this tonal contour tends to reinforce a quantitative stress pattern first induced from the Homeric and other stichic Greek data by Sidney Allen. There is therefore a case to be made, and I have made it, for aesthetic choice in the placement of words in relation to Homeric metre, to reinforce ictus with accent in a patterned, syncopated way—neither automatic and monotonous nor purely random, but with expectations created of regular cadences, points of agreement at mid-line and line end.2
But when it comes to musicality, a certain reservation is made for taste and private experience. An impassioned and detailed case can be made for the perfection of a piece of music or its execution—the polyphonic sigh of a nocturne, or the consummation of a blues on the off-beat—but there will always be the fellow who wants to change the channel. It can be absurd, and often embarrassing to both parties, to try to explain how a certain favourite song is musical in some objectively delineatable way. Yet a Homerist has been reduced by a hundred years and more of metrical-traditional-oralist mumbo-jumbo, to being forced to prove there’s anything at all going on with his poet’s poetry, at any given moment, beyond filling up a hexameter line with a pre-fab building block of ‘traditional material’. People who felt the presence of a poet, and unitarians generally, tended to be sneered at passive-agressively by the scientists.
Consider the fate of an autograph of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, were all knowledge to be lost about the significance of the staff or the patterns of dots and squiggles scrawled all over the pages. At what point would anyone consider looking beyond the fascinating story told there in German, seeing as that was (obviously) the actual text? Scholarship would proliferate, what with analysing its different diction and styles and speculating about its origins. No doubt some would argue that certain parts were ‘undoubtedly’ lyric poems or ‘arias’ originally separate from the Ur-text and later incorporated, while other parts, said to be by the so-called ‘M’ author, were believed to originate in some now lost unitary work, perhaps stemming from a German oral tradition—although a faction solidly maintains, citing parallel sources, that they bespoke a written original of this work, a sort of German ‘bible’. We envision a certain school that would be convinced that in the cyclic background, there were hints, still for them discernible at times in the St. Matthew Passion text, that the death of the Jesus figure was not in fact the end of it, as the extant text would have it, but that in some traditions it led to a transfiguring apotheosis of some kind. At what point would the project of deciphering the formulas in the squiggle patterns appeal to any but the most esoteric boundary riders in the academic club? Who could seriously think that such work could contribute anything worthwhile to the burgeoning anthropological debate on German Jesus-mythology, to which Picander (some say ‘M’, some even say ‘Bach’) contributes the fundamental text?
Now imagine what sort of lunatic it would be who dared claim that actually the staff and squiggles contained almost the whole point of the composition, and that the story being told was in large part a musical witnessing and a musical meditation. What chance would there be for the imagined music of Bach, on imagined instruments and voices affected with longing, in the face of a mountain of linguistic and humanistic scholarship proliferating across generations about the transmission of a quasi-religious myth? ‘Hang on, this fellow is turning a foundational German text into a sort of Italian libretto. An unnecessary mystifier at best, at worst a mischievous self-aggrandiser. Yes of course there was music involved, everybody knows that. So what. Licence to teach denied!’
Fortunately the East Roman manuscripts of Homer contain some prosodic notations that rather hit one on the head with their impact. The sense of dramatic intention in the music is palpable. As I have tried to show in earlier work, one does not actually have to become skilful at singing Homer to recognise the histrionic effects of musical drama achieved in the score, as it is traditionally marked and accented. This is a fortuitous feature that, one hopes, will help readers entertain the possibility that a) the prosody denoted in these manuscripts is of considerable musical interest without fantasising about vanished melodies that were unrelated to this prosody and its intertwined metre; and b) that the obviousness of these examples will open the mind to the more subtle and pervasive musicality that is the reason for being of the distinctive Homeric diction and the evocation, of being itself, by noun-and-epithet phrases.
There are musical moments that can be discovered directly and visually from the prosodic notation once the new theory of the accent is brought to bear, and allowed to do its work. Some of these are quite blunt instruments. In the following instance I have written up, describing Odyssey 23.175, one does not even need the new theory. One need only register that consecutive, long stressed syllables must obtrude more or less violently, like a jackhammer into the rhythmic heartbeart, ba-dum, of poetry:
οὔτε λίην ἄγαμαι, μάλα δ’ εὖ οἶδ’ οἷος ἔησθα
There is in this period a remarkable sequence, against all notions of epic rhythm and harmony, of three successive circumflected syllables: εὖ οἶδ’ οἷος ἔησθα. If there is an absolute in metrical theory, it is that rhythm depends on alternation—on the alternation of emphases in time. Hence there is also something absolute about the harmonic innovation registered here; three consecutive complete Hellenic contonations should be unsingable within a dactylic line. Even someone who hears formulæ in Homer must admit that there is something more than an instance of non-formulaic language going on here: there is something antithetical to the very notion of a metrical formula. Indeed, it is by ‘innovation’ that the concept ‘tradition’ is analytically determined, and hence by which it comes properly to light—not by the ‘formula’. At a moment of ultimate tension, the histrionic minstrel has dared his music to overreach its native forms, to find and to embody an expression inside the rhythm and harmony of the epic line which captures the sure mind, the knowing heart, the very living breath of Penelope. ‘I know you, what you were,’ she seems to say to the stranger before her, with all the force, and risk, of her own identity. This is a moment to be savoured, a moment of musical disclosure and self-revelation … a moment scarcely to be matched in the apparitions of later literature.3
It turns out that such runs of three straight circumflected syllables are exceedingly rare in Homer—there are only a handful—though I have not catalogued them exhaustively. (This particular descriptive task, and any number of other studies of prosodic patterns in the standard editions disclosed by the new theory, are warmly solicited.) It is therefore rather striking that this figure occurs fully three other times in the speeches of Penelope herself. One is obliged to speak of a motif characteristic of this Homeric personage, and no other, whatever an actor may choose to make of the effect, or infer about the speaker’s character or state of mind in each passage. It is only at the critical moment in Book 23, however—the ‘recognition scene’—that the sequence occurs so strikingly in mid-line. The great majority of instances do occur in Homeric speeches rather than narrative, usually at the beginning of lines, and often involve the sort of emphatic circumflected monosyllables typical of a speakers’ immediate needs—as for example, words like ‘now’ (νῦν) or again (αὖ). Penelope’s first examples occur twice at the start of lines in Book 4:
νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν ἀνηρείψαντο θύελλαι
ἀκλέα ἐκ μεγάρων, οὐδ’ ὁρμηθέντος ἄκουσα. 4.727-8
But again, now, my son, beloved—they snatched him up, the storm winds,
An unknown out of these rooms, and I didn’t even hear of his setting off.
This is when Penelope first hears that her son has absconded to Pylos, and is expressing her dismay to her serving women. She repeats the figure, it seems in a somewhat different emotional register, a little later to her sister in a dream:
νῦν αὖ παῖς ἀγαπητὸς ἔβη κοίλης ἐπὶ νηός,
νήπιος, οὔτε πόνων ἐὺ εἰδὼς οὔτ’ ἀγοράων. 4.817-18
Again now my son, beloved, went on a hollow ship,
The fool, not knowing his way around real work nor public business.
The pattern is found also in Book 16, when Penelope dresses down Antinous for his murderous plotting; she reminds him that Odysseus once gave his own father safe haven:
τοῦ νῦν οἶκον ἄτιμον ἔδεις, μνάᾳ δὲ γυναῖκα
παῖδά τ’ ἀποκτείνεις, ἐμὲ δὲ μεγάλως ἀκαχίζεις: 16.431-2
That’s whose home you’re eating up, right now, with no payment; you pursue his wife
And mean to kill off his son, and it’s me most greatly that you grieve.
Odysseus also begins a line this way (νῦν αὖ δεῦρ’, 16.233). Other examples include Nestor, Aeneas and Poseidon in the Iliad (VII.329, XX.231, 297). Achilles puts it like this, when he instructs Lycaon (ἀλλὰ φίλος, θάνε καὶ σύ) to lie there with the fishes:
Ἐνταυθοῖ νῦν κεῖσο μετ’ ἰχθύσιν, οἵ σ’ ὠτειλήν
αἷμ’ ἀπολιχμήσονται ἀκηδέες· XXI.122-3
There you are now, lie among the fishes! They’ll lick
The blood off your wound without a care …
It is evident that some level of passionate intensity in the speaker is expressed by this insistent circumflected prosody. There is more than one example, however, from the Homeric narrative as well. It is of course less obvious how to render the naturally emotive tenor of such prosodic emphasis when it comes from the narrator. But this prosody occurs when a ship in the Achaean camp first catches fire at Iliad XVI.123:
… τοὶ δ’ ἔμβαλον ἀκάματον πῦρ
νηῒ θοῇ· τῆς δ’ αἶψα κατ’ ἀσβέστη κέχυτο φλόξ. XVI.122-3
… they threw the weariless fire
Into the swift ship: and over her there quickly poured down an unquenchable blaze.
Certainly there is something objectively structural to the story about this famous ignition as a cue to action and a multivalent metapoetic signal, and it is likely that the narrator himself feels a special investment. But I admit I find it surprising to find this heavy prosody outside a speaker’s speech, and I resist basing an interpretive claim about the narrator’s psychic state because of the music of this moment. There is no doubt that the intensive effect seems best to suit not description but the histrionic rhythm of someone making a point in a speech. Three successive monosyllabic contonations are not to be found in the reverie of the similes. They provide proof-of-concept that aesthetic suitability to situation and speaker is a governing factor in Homeric poetising, so that effects are sometimes summoned which conflict directly with the dactylic ictus of the metre, and hence whose nature cannot be formulated in terms of metrical ‘formulas’.
When the new theory is brought to bear, many more cases of three successive prominent long syllables come to light (though they are still by no means common, in the nature of dactylic metre). It is the consecutive circumflexes that most call attention to themselves by their anti-rhythm; successive long prominences of different shapes (e.g., barytone, circumflex, oxytone) at least provide variety in their reinforcement, unlike the cases above. All the same, particularly striking is Agamemnon’s ‘apology’ speech (XIX.78-144) , delivered (pointedly) from his seat, not standing, in public to Achilles when Achilles claims to renounce his wrath. (One wonders if a seated posture in the performer may have played some role in the prosodic expressions that follow.) Fully four of the lines in this fraught speech about his manic blindness involve sequences of three straight prosodically prominent long syllables (not necessarily circumflexes):
ἀνδρῶν δ᾽ ἐν πολλῷ ὁμάδῳ πῶς κέν τις ἀκούσαι XIX.81
σύνθεσθ᾽ Ἀργεῖοι, μῦθόν τ᾽ εὖ γνῶτε ἕκαστος. 84
τῶν ἀνδρῶν γενεῆς οἵ θ᾽ αἵματος ἐξ ἐμεῦ εἰσι. 105
οὐ δυνάμην λελαθέσθ᾽ Ἄτης, ᾗ πρῶτον ἀάσθην. 136
In line 81, we have ὁμάδῳ πῶς κέν τις, a post-acute barytone, a circumflex and a closed oxytone. In 84, it is μῦθόν τ’ εὖ γνῶτε, circumflex, closed oxytone, circumflex, circumflex. In 105, γενεῆς οἵ θ᾽ αἵματος, circumflex, oxytone + elided enclitic, oxytone; in 136, Ἄτης, ᾗ πρῶτον, post-acute barytone, circumflex, circumflex. This speech appears to be unique in Homer for these sequences; allied to the mystery of why he doesn’t stand up, despite his protestation about how hard it is to address a vulgar, hostile crowd, is, it would seem, a stridency of delivery in lieu of manliness.
In XIX.84 there are four consecutive prosodically prominent long syllables, when Agamemnon means to stress that though he’s making a point to Achilles, he wants each and everyone else to bloody well take it in. This really is a rare sequence—not only four prominent syllables in a row, but four dynamically prominent long syllables in a row. I know so far of only three other such sequences in Homer: Iliad V.340, describing ichor flowing from her wound, when Diomedes attacks Aphrodite:
ἰχώρ, οἷός πέρ τε ῥέει μακάρεσσι θεοῖσιν·
Here, however, the oxytone on ἰχώρ depends upon the punctuation; without the unnecessary editorial comma, the syllable becomes grave. Editors need to start considering the prosodic environment surrounding, before they decide to alter it with a punctuated pause. Also in the Iliad narrative, also describing a sudden blaze of fire, is this sequence of five straight tonally dynamic syllables, four of them prominent (but only three in succession) (V.7):
τοῖόν οἱ πῦρ δαῖεν ἀπὸ κρατός τε καὶ ὤμων,
Such was the fire that blazed from his head and his shoulders
This is the ignition by Athena of the aristeia of Diomedes. Here we are not shy to register the narrator’s investment: it seems that ignitions excite him. The μένος or ‘vital energy’ instilled by the goddess is embodied by the rhapsode, from toe to head, in cresting imagery.4
At 19.486, Odysseus is desperate that Eurycleia remain silent when she recognises him by his scar:
σίγα, μή τίς τ’ ἄλλος ἐνὶ μεγάροισι πύθηται.
Silence! Lest anyone else in the big rooms hear.
We read barytone, long oxytone, closed oxytone, closed oxytone. We imagine a fierce stage whisper. Σίγᾱ!
Most striking of all is this moment in the speech of Priam to Achilles, XXIV.505-6:
ἔτλην δ’ οἷ’ οὔ πώ τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἄλλος,
ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι.
I dared what no one ever has yet upon the ground, no other mortal:
To reach my hand to the mouth of the man who slew my child.
As in Odyssey 19.486 above, where Odysseus is in danger of being recognised too soon, the use of two enclitics creates a most decided pattern: five consecutive long syllables, all of them tonally dynamic, the final four tonally prominent in succession: in this case, barytone, circumflex, oxytone, oxytone, according to the new parlance. In the next line Priam describes the most unprecedented action described in all of Homer—perhaps in all of poetry and literature. His announcement in the line preceding calls forth also an unprecedented prosody, in his emphatic awareness that what he does has no precedent.
Another speaker who can find no precedent is Antinous, who rises to this pitch when describing—who else?—Penelope. He openly complains about her wiles and duplicity, but wow! What a woman. Neither he nor his fellows had ever seen or heard of her equal:
ἔργα τ’ ἐπίστασθαι περικαλλέα καὶ φρένας ἐσθλάς
κέρδεά θ’, οἷ’ οὔ πώ τιν’ ἀκούομεν οὐδε παλαιῶν,
τάων αἳ πάρος ἦσαν ἐϋπλοκαμῖδες ’Αχαιαί,
Τυρώ τ’ Ἀλκμήνη τε ἐϋστέφανός τε Μυκήνη· 2.117-20
To know how to make gorgeous works, and excellent brains
To profit by them, the like of no other woman we hear about—not even among the ancients,
Those women who once upon a time were the Fair-Tresses, Achaean alumnae,
Tyro and Alcmene, and Mycene of the beautiful coronal:
The sequence κέρδεά θ’, οἷ’ οὔ πώ τιν’ follows a short oxytone with a circumflex and two long oxytones. As bitter as he seems to be about her behaviour, the thought of her bursts in on him and sends him into a reverie about the skilful intelligences of the past, women from story and song.
Let us say again, these are the horn blasts and the timpani rolls: these are not the subtle shadings and the lyric breakouts and the mesmerising name-and-epithet invocations. These latter are the meat of the pudding. But the fact that these melo-dramatic moments obtrude from the page when one merely looks at the accent marks, must be taken as a vindication of the idea that these inherited prosodic notations preserve some of Homer’s musical life, as surely as they instruct the breath of his histrionic actor. It is hoped that they serve as the icing and enticement to sample the rest in the confidence that one is in the power of a conscious, musical and dramatic aesthetic. Such an enticement seems necessary in the face of a doctrine that encourages students to explain away Homer’s text, by contrasting the peculiarities of its narrative with the characteristics of narratives one finds in literature—and sourcing the differences in the handicaps of a non-literary composition—rather than attempt to explain what it is in the poems that moves them. This is not a defensible approach when comparing Beaumarchais’s play with Mozart’s version of the The Marriage of Figaro, or the Gospel of St. Matthew to Bach’s Passion. These modern composers did not take the repeats because they had to.
Homer’s narrative without its music is merely da Ponte’s libretto. Rather than try to demonstrate to the deaf that there is beautiful music to be heard, I first point to the most obvious signs, the loudest sounds loud enough to register even visually from the score. It will be up to the student to take and eat, to encounter for him or herself the living substance from which the overt outbursts emerge, and train her ear to hear it. The oral theory renders so many of Homer’s noun-and-epithet ingredients as—at best—signs of the inventive use of traditional filler. But the dramatic outbursts in speeches are not anomalies or strange eruptions; they are only the moments that most literally catch one’s breath in the movement of the symphony.
Consider that in relation to the oral theory, these moments of anomalously insistent prosody are like OOPArts, ‘out-of-place artefacts’ in archaeology, that confound current notions of technological development and historical chronology. By themselves, these transient peaks of intensity bespeak a dramatist’s mastery of language in the imitation of the speech act, as crafted soliloquies comprehending all that soliloquies imply about psychological interiority and the felt externalising of public speech. There are no peaks without mountains. They rather force upon us the question, what about these verses and speeches is the oral theory trying to explain? For what purpose, and to whom? What exactly has it clarified?
The Venetus A and its peers have given us a score that must be studied. This is a score that must be played. Students must learn how to read the music before they presume to edit it, let alone talk about its meaning. How will they do this without a teacher or prosodic corrector? Perhaps we may take Phemius, Ithaca’s minstrel under compulsion, seriously with our grain of salt. αὐτοδίδακτος δ’ εἰμί (Odyssey 22.347), he says: ‘self-taught am I.’
Perhaps students will find, as I do, that there is nothing traditional there. The Titans of Greek letters, after all—in history, philosophy, poetry—reacted to Homer more often than not, by attempting to correct, to censor, to compete with, or to defeat and replace him. But perhaps there are some reciters who will find the opposite: then at least we can begin any discussion of tradition from a common starting point—not a formulaic text but a heard music.
My own instincts are with the analysts (not ‘neo-’), and based on concrete linguistic stimuli, but I am not so foolish as to confuse instinct with argument or demonstration. ‘Anomalies’ in the style and usage of the Books 24 of the two poems, for example, could be down to differences in genre and mood, the exhalations of a coda offsetting the piece, perhaps meaning to restore us to a dictional present. There is more—and less—to a musical finale in opera than merely finishing the story. Where at the end of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Hermes acts as a guide into an Underworld, for Priam and the slaughtered Suitors, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion sings the now crucified and entombed Jesus to bed: ‘Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh!’
It is a question whether the texts of Homer themselves have no precedent, as I feel sure—three straight stresses intended—or merely no surviving one. Homer, after all, had never heard of ‘the Greeks’. After waking from the nightmare of 20th Century orthodoxy, we can ask of Homer afresh: where does this music come from? For what purpose, and for whom?
Originally from A. P. David, ‘Singing Homer’s Spell: The Disyllabic Contonation and the Proposition Made by East Roman Manuscripts’, Dramaturgias: Revista do Laboratório de Dramaturgia da Universidade de Brasília, 19:7 (2022), 805-66; since revised.
see David, The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, especially ch. 4, ‘The Form of the Hexameter: The Origins of Caesura and Diaeresis’, 94-137.
Ibid., 136-7
see Katherine Kretler, One Man Show: Poetics and Presence in the Iliad and Odyssey, Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020, 59-63