In the transmission of Homer’s music across time and economies, there is a lacuna that can only be filled by a sort of giant. Back of the itinerant thespian rhapsodes competing at city festivals around Greece, successive generations of anonymous wandering minstrels did not somehow, in increments, build a script of Homer, nor did orally improvising singer-songwriters and after-dinner citharodes. It seems that in between, behind a curtain, as yet unmasked, lived an extraordinarily musical composer, steeped in bardic lays, but with the scale of vision to transform the meaning of ‘epic’ to include what can be found in an Iliad or an Odyssey. Not a tweaker of formulas, but a mysterious operatic Shake-Speare from beyond stage left, like the one who intruded into the rough mix of Elizabethan theatre.
There are grounds for an overhaul and a revolution in Homeric studies entailing also a revolution in Homer’s reception, his public face. In particular we must reject many of the seemingly canonical oralist presumptions about the creation of Homer’s text, because of a shockingly fundamental oversight in its reading by modern authorities in departments of Classics.
The prejudices of the oralist mindset ignore wilfully the musical dimensions of the original composition, first notated in Alexandria, which are both recorded and preserved in the prosody of Homer’s Mediaeval manuscripts. Because of this, students and scholars have mistaken the libretto for the text, and have largely missed the music of Homer’s varied repertoire. His speeches are arias and soliloquies, there is dramatic recitative, contemplative simile interludes and lyric suspension in the midst of narrative catalogue. Saving this verbal music from a debilitating inapprehension will be critical for the transmission of Homer’s art to future generations. Homer needs to be saved from both the tuneless metrics of the Classics departments and the primitive formulaic needs of the improvising bard, to be restored by skilled soloists to the theatre and even the concert stage. It is for these venues that Homer may plausibly be believed to have intended her compositions.
In the wake of generations of orthodoxy, it might seem outlandish, even upsetting, to question the explanation of Homer’s text as the product of an oral composition and tradition. But the theory was based, I have argued, on a wrong comparison,1 one which originally seemed to intend to apologise for certain characteristics of Homer’s storytelling. These had been perceived for the first time to be deficiencies, in relation to narratives familiar to modern scholars raised amidst printed novels silently read. The comparison to orally improvised storytelling within oral traditions allowed the several kinds of elements experienced in the modern silent reading of Homer as repetitions, at the level of the phrase and the theme, to be interpreted as necessary reflexes of improvised narrative within the parameters of traditional material and performance. Traditional singers drew in the moment, it is imagined, on a received, professional metrical formulary, and frequently deployed traditional themes as ‘singer’s rests’.
What can be lost sight of in this comparison is the registration of effects of intentional repetition, with which we are familiar in the modern, sounded-out world of musical culture. Here we find melodies, themes, motifs and leitmotivs, not to mention refrains, all of which cannot come into being without repetition, and which find their reason for being inside this recurrence. I suggest the right comparison to illuminate the features of a manuscript of Homer, like the Venetus A, is to a classical musical score.
Such scores also are, literally, literature, whose transmission and analysis depend, in part, on their written form. Beethoven famously never heard some of his greatest works, except in his imagination. His literary output was, all the same, the scoring of instructions for hearing performers to perform. In modern musical culture, both faces, living performance and fixed scripting, are essential for transmission. With its time signatures and bar lines, the musical score communicates the underlying beat, the metrical ictus. But the notation also conveys tonal and rhythmic patterns and emphases, which sometimes agree, sometimes disagree with the metrical beat. There are off-beats in the bar: there is no music without them. All of these elements and their dynamic relationships are present, it turns out, also in the Homeric score.
This Homeric music is not merely metrical (metre by itself is rarely sufficient for making music) but melodic and rhythmic. Generations of scholars and students have inexplicably ignored the accent marks that descend to us as essential features, not secondary diacritics, in the representation of Greek poetry, and prose, via alphabetic writing. In focusing solely on metre, and metrical phrasing as ‘building blocks’ that aid extemporisation in a supposedly improvised oral performance, Homeric studies have failed even to register the tonal and other musical effects that evidently inform and inspire Homer’s own aesthetic of the phrasal cadence and the dynamic line, in actual musical composition. This has led to an embarrassing and patronising blindness in Homer’s modern scholars, apologising for her apparent repetitions with theories of formulaic composition—the bald opposite of the exquisite aural sensibility of song we may expect from the world’s most famous blind poet.
It is not a new idea that alphabetic writing was developed in Greece to write down the Homeric poems.2 Certainly the earlier Mycenaean syllabary was not adequate to record the music of Homeric poetry. But our long immersion in a culture of silent reading and literacy across disciplines may have miscoloured our sense for the use and intent of this tool.
In the modern musical score we have a literary paradigm that encompasses a professional literate class of composers and performers, fluent in musical notation, combined with a largely illiterate audience; yet both artist and audience are equally fluent in the musical language, each receptive to the subtlest expressive nuance, though scholarly accounts of these musical effects in performance must resort to the higher mathematics of chordal and rhythmic ratios.
There is a potent paradigm here for the purpose and function of Greek writing across disciplines and texts: in mathematics as well as history and poetry, Ancient Greek writing is comparable to a musical notation enabling performance. In poetic texts in particular, the addition of accent marks in Alexandria completes the musical picture. The metrical patterns were already inferable from the sequence of letters, according to certain syllabic rules and conventions, to the extent that modern editors will presume to emend received Homeric texts to ‘fix’ the metre, or to emend lyric texts based on a soundless and motionless mathematical approach to their concept of metrical responsion. The accentual patterns consummate this structure, just like the crotchets and semi-quavers scribbled within and across the empty bar lines.
The Alexandrian accent marks—when their meaning is properly interpreted—allow Greek texts to be sounded in rhythm even by non-Greeks. In a parallel way, the modern musical notation, showing bar lines, pitch patterns and emphases, makes it possible for an Austrian composer and performers of all races and nations to produce and enact the very finest of Italian opera—for audiences who cannot read a musical score to enjoy across oceans from Italy. The composers and performers, by contrast, are usually highly expert in the musical notation, but there are some celebrated singers, and even composers, who cannot read or write music. In music, literacy and orality are not the essential factors in interpreting the ‘literature’ that they are made out to be, as a matter of axiomatic assumption, in academic environments.
There is no royal road to the learning of ancient Greek. But with the newly discovered promise of performing the literature, afforded for the first time by a robust theory of ancient prosody, perhaps there will be a new attractant to those rare students capable of making headway in this most challenging and precious of humanist disciplines, who nowadays get what exposure they get through toneless translations into modern languages.
Let us forget what we think we know about ‘epic poems’. The phrase could be thought, by etymology, to describe products of ‘verbal music-craft’. ‘Formulas’ are therefore not germane: they are defined as things inherited, to come by the improvising performer ready-made, not newly crafted; they are conceptualised for Homer, alone among Virgil, Dante, Milton and other epic composers, as his means of filling up as yet vacant verses. Filler. The only craft required in the Homeric case would seem to be that of the jigsaw puzzle. Let us now begin to think newly about the nature of Greek words and the musical dimensions of the poetic craft involved when a verbal pitch accent, expressed as built-in pitch contours, characterises the verbal material to be arranged and performed.
The oral premise encourages a modern student to see Homer’s text as intrinsically provisional, one version among possible ‘equivalent’ alternatives devisable from the formulary. This approach immediately short changes the encounter with the composition. Even if improvisation plays a rôle in the poiesis, remembered music impresses with its sense of inevitability. In savouring a line one likes to think not that it might as well have cadenced on this note or that note, but that it had to be the very note the singer chose. Homer’s text deserves the response of a musical imagination, receptive to the effects of her accentual artistry, rather than one keen to second-guess her options.
If one merely looks at a musical score, holds it in the hand, it seems a mathematical chalkboard, filled with esoteric symbols, clefs and time signatures, rigid bar lines, distinct repeating patterns amid dense runs of notes as well as instructions to repeat. It seems an exercise in formalism, even if neither sonnet nor sonata. And so it can continue to seem in practice or rehearsal—or when a performance goes wrong. Bach’s Suites for Cello enact the most formal of formal dances of an Euro-local and bygone era. The steps of the gigue and sarabande are forgotten. Yet we all know instinctively the feeling of collapse when there is a musical misstep.
When the score is actually sounded out in concert, however, there can be a sense in cellist and audience of defying gravity. The music soars in freedom of movement, though one longs in suspense for certain melodies and rhythms to return, and repeat indefinitely. Art is all about choice, is it not, definite choice within a formalism that frees the spirit. The dactylic hexameter and literally all of Greek metrics is a description of form that constrains and instructs the breath and the feet. But in its poetry, Greek—language—sings.
When one attends a recital of the Bach Suites, one listens for one’s favourite passages; how did this young cellist do them? Was there something different in the ways that this woman bows and articulates them? Or does her chosen tempo altogether miss the point? One also marks those passages that one has never really noticed before, and credits the performer for drawing them out to one’s attention for the first time.
Perhaps listening to Homeric rhapsodes was also like this. These men competed! What does one suppose the competition was judged on? The poem itself was a given, the same things always happened! Bach’s cellists are now also working with a known score. Everything is familiar, not just the repeats. What can be original and unique, if you’re Ion the rhapsode getting up in front of everyone again, armed with your stick like Willie Nelson’s guitar? Even if the competing rhapsodes covered different phases of the story, perhaps they had different ways of rendering the same characters. Or perhaps even the recurring rhythmic phrase melodies were rendered by different rhapsodes in distinctive and idiosyncratic—and winning—ways?
If you actually try out the formulas, the phrases Homer repeats—sound them out with their syncopations and embedded pitch patterns—you’ll repeat them too! It soon becomes evident why certain rhapsodes were celebrities and prize winners. It takes skill to render these phrases well, and to deliver the whole lines they help to propel.
But ‘traditional formulas’ get used just because they’re there. And they’re there to ease production, like pre-assembled parts. Small wonder that the Homer industry is prone to frame its Homeric criticism as the ‘discovery’ of anonymous artistry in usage, despite its subject’s ostensibly primitive, oral and formulaic origin and composition. This is a kind of colonialist sophistry that finally serves neither Homer nor his students. Students should not be ‘set up’ with dummy problems. If they find Homer formulaic, perhaps they have not actually heard his music. That is very likely, given the emphases and skills of his current teachers and translators. But perhaps they should credit their judgement, and seek out poetry instead that does not so offend or otherwise confuse them.
Modern scholars have approached Homer’s verses as though his metre was such a constraint that he was forced to reuse phrases that filled segments of his lines, if they had once been happily discovered. For some reason the summoning power of the leitmotiv was not in their vocabulary. When one sounds him out, and names with their epithets sing their subjects present, and the rhythm answers through cadence and coda, it becomes clear that the dactylic hexameter is Homer’s playground, not his prison.
see A. P. David, The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 1-22.
Barry B. Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.