Introduction1
For a hundred years or more, the scholarship on Homeric song has been fixated on performance: its conditions, traditions, and relationship to written texts. In this it resembles the scholarship on Bach and Mozart. In their case, however, there is also a living tradition of performing their compositions before audiences—disrupted and evolving amidst revolutions and world wars—along with the continuing existence of professional guilds of specialised performers. The interpretations developed within these orchestral traditions, and through their performers, exert no small influence on the analyses of the texts and composers offered by scholars. Few would take seriously a study of a text of Bach or Wagner from someone who was unfamiliar with the interpretations born of its actual performance, or the efforts of genius among members of its performance guilds. How comment on music one cannot play, and has never heard? Why listen to a critic of Shakespeare who cannot recite Shakespeare’s English, or has never seen a performance? ‘The play’s the thing,’ in every sense: one must experience how the performance works, before one can begin to interpret the thing itself, or even imagine an audience’s resources or reaction.
Unfortunately this essential inspiration and feedback from performers and living performance traditions does not exist for Homeric scholars, or for the Homeric texts. Homer himself asks for his text to be sung (Iliad I.1). But no separate instructions for Homeric melody have come down; and the accent marks embedded in our texts—which were known to indicate pitch contours, and so were a likely clue to any original melody—appeared to bear no patterned relation to the downbeats (or ‘ictus’) of the metre. (This is a principal reason why, at present, the ancient Greek accent marks tend to be ignored by teachers and students alike; they do not seem to reinforce anything that might engage their interest about poetry or prose.) This state of affairs has done nothing, however, to foster critical humility in the face of a lamented ignorance; rather, to a proliferation of interpretive schemata in the field of Homeric studies, leading even to the inculcation of consensus orthodoxies about performance. The only facsimile of a living feedback is sought from unrelated ‘oral traditions’, in particular a relatively modern one from Bosnia. In desperation at the critical vacuum, apples have been compared to elephants. Insight into the composition of what ancient writers approached as a finished work of musical art, is sourced in comparisons to the mindset, and the stultifying product, of extemporising Bosnian guslars.
Consider the statement of Paul Maas, to my mind slightly gleeful: ‘we have no means of reading, reciting or hearing Greek poetry as it actually sounded. It may be possible for us to form a mental notion of it; but such a notion is too shadowy to serve as a basis for the scientific investigation of the subject.’2 I say gleeful because this asserted impossibility and shadowiness is precisely the cue for mathematicians to wade in and declare the abstraction of Greek metre as the summary and knowable nature of Greek poetry. In relation to this tack perhaps oral theory seemed clever and freeing, in foisting onto Homer its own shadowy invention of the metrical formula, albeit as part of an elegant theory of economy and extension.
My new theory of the Ancient Greek pitch accent, however, developed in The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics (Oxford 2006), allows for the first time that the integral pitch contours—the melody—of spoken Greek can be restored to ancient prose and poetry. Greek metres, such as Homer’s dactylic hexameter, are already well studied; now Homer’s melodic contours can be restored to the metre’s underlying ictus. What emerges is the consummation of metre: a sophisticated syncopation, counterpoint leading to reinforcement of ictus by accent, disagreement moving toward harmonic and rhythmic agreement at regular moments in the line. The purely metrical rubric of ‘caesura’ is replaced by the musical concept of a regular mid-line harmonic cadence, where caesura becomes a merely automatic consequence of the musical motive. This is music that needs to be played—for its own sake, clearly, but also for a new critical assessment of the Homeric composition.
I shall therefore begin to record a performance of the Odyssey, its intonation restored solely by the new interpretation of the textual accents. The purpose here is not only to serve scholarly interpretation, for all that actual performance would seem to be a sine qua non, prior to such interpretation; the principal purpose, self-motivated, is simply to bring the Homeric music to life. ‘Interpretation’ is itself the proper word for the act of a singer of a song, even if he or she is the composer. This project will help to restore the musical reality to Homeric scholarship, where interpretation occurs both before and during performance, not only afterward in response. There is no call for fantasising about the mentality, stamina, and memory of an extemporising singer, an irreproducible thing in any case; what emerges in practice is that the actual text of Homer we possess takes disciplined preparation to perform. Even after one deals with the peculiarities of grammar and diction, peculiar not just to Homeric Greek but to its author, the rendering of the rhythms and intonations of the Odyssey involves constant decisions of emphasis, breath and tonality. No doubt its competing rhapsodic performers in the ancient world were known for their differences in these decisions, just like the many virtuosic cellists of the Bach Suites.
I have argued that epic narrative has its origin in catalogues—lists of various kinds—names of matriarchs, ships of warriors, genealogies, sequences of events—that were, literally, re-counted in the rhythmic company of a particular round dance, a version of which is still the national dance of Greece. The effect of dancing in a circle the rhythms of names and nouns with their epithets, I suggest, had the effect of summoning the presence of the dead or the absent, in the most vivid enactment of memorial. (One may imagine the uncanny affect of such memorial for those dancers who knew themselves as living descendants.) The rhythmic name-and-epithet phrases characteristic of Homer came also to evoke, rather than merely signify, objects in the course of the narrative, unlike the nouns alone. All of Homer’s lines can be danced: they are dance music, just like the music of Bach. A demonstration, using the proem to the Catalogue of Ships:
The hexameter is built upon the dactyl, an isochronous foot. That is, the strong and weak parts of the foot have the same time length. Antoine Meillet points to the equality in length of arsis and thesis in the dactyl as ‘une innovation du grec,’3 but the dactyl is better described as an anomaly rather than an innovation; contrasting time pulses are the rule in Indo-European metrics, and speech-driven metres generally:
This fundamental isochrony in the foot, unique to Greek, is itself evidence of an orchestic origin for Greek metre. A language-derived metre would rather be expected to build itself out of contrasting time pulses, as Meillet well understood. An isochronous foot generates isometric music. Isometry is a prevalent characteristic of dance and of dance music. Neither Greek nor any other Indo-European language appears to have been designed to reinforce isochronous dactyls.4
I elsewhere show how the derivation of the hexameter itself from Aeolic cola—where the extant poetry was once called ‘logaoedic’ because its rhythm seemed as much reminiscent of speech as song—is a currently prevalent doctrine that is all the same an epic failure. [see endnote] The origin of the dactylic hexameter is manifestly extra-linguistic; it is something to which the iambic Greek language had to be forced to adapt.
‘Epic narrative’ grew by insertion, say, of a tale about a person or place in the list; this digression exhibits the phenomenon called ‘ring composition’, where the closing lines recall the opening lines of the insertion, and thereby bring the singer back to his place in the list—so the digression, however expansive, does not cause him to lose his place in ‘the count.’ I have called this style of composition ‘intemporising’, to characterise its motive in relation to the counting catalogue in a way strongly to distinguish it from the prevailing fixation, ungrounded in text and untethered to context, on ‘extemporising’.
Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey are simply ‘intemporised’ catalogues, however, and neither of them, in my opinion, was composed for performances with dancers. (Consider that the ancient ‘orchestra’, or dancing-space, now refers to seated musicians, who dare, at most, to sway, while they play gavottes and minuets.) But the Iliad does contain an actual ‘Catalogue of Ships’, which defies every modern motivation in narrative. Its once living impact as dance ritual has preserved its traditional tether.
In reciting Homer over the past 35 years, it has been instructive to distinguish between two different styles of recitation, which reflect the unique potentiality of the Homeric text, as dance music, song, and poetry. The style that I find best suits a portion of the Iliad I call ‘bardic’; this is because the integral isochrony and isometry of the dactylic hexameter is rendered in a way that can accompany dancers dancing to a repeated groove; in effect, the various emphases of rubato become constrained. (I should clarify: I here mean to distinguish ‘bardic’ as a style of purely vocal recitation; I do not discuss the modal melodic interpretations supported by a kithara, whose practitioner was sometimes called a ‘citharode’.5) In general—and only in general, one cannot say this about the speeches—the Iliad ‘sings’ best when keeping time. But considerable literary prompts (as well as musical/dramatic ones) suggest that the Odyssey was intended for solo performance, without music or dancers, in the manner of the rhapsodes who performed Homer in Plato’s antiquity. Odysseus himself takes over from a lyre-playing singer and dancers in Phaeacia, himself alone without a musical instrument, to tell the story of his wanderings. This ‘rhapsodic’ style, without a constraint on the equal timing of whole lines, allows the text to be composed, and rendered, at moments like lyric poetry, or at others like Shakespearean dramatic verse. This combination of performative possibilities from the same words and metre—as dance music, lyric poetry or dramatic speech—with extraordinary effectiveness in all of these modes—seems to be unique to the Homeric text in all the world’s literature. (Bob Dylan notwithstanding, song lyrics rarely work as lyric poems.)
In no sense would I attempt to offer a ‘definitive’ interpretation. This would counter the purpose: the aim is first to illustrate the theory of the accent, so that more performers may be inspired to try it on for themselves; but also to record my own statement, as one of the first into the pool. Faced only with a written text forgotten from the repertoire, the cellist Pablo Casals discovered Bach’s suites composed for an ancestor of his instrument. His pioneering recording inspired others to rediscover this text, to the extent that skilled cellists, one hundred years after Casals, now view its interpretation as a modern rite of passage, and it has become a cerebral, popular sensation whose origin, like Homer’s, comes directly from the rhythms of dance. Interest in the textual history of the Cello Suites, including in the varieties of its notation, has burgeoned and caused new performative interpretation in phrasings, slurrings and bowings. In light of these developments Casals’ own interpretation has become dated, considered ‘of its time’. Like Bach, Homer can also find an audience if his text is performed—however small, and however alien or ahistorical is the technique of the performing artist. Such performance, as it becomes more known, will also influence the editing of the Homeric text, and its interpretation. The fact is that with the insight of the new historical theory of the tonal accent, added to the already quantitative syllables, combined with the underlying hexameter drawn from folk dance, it turns out there is as much or more musical notation to instruct performance in Homer’s text, as there is in that of the Bach Suites. Casals’ recording, therefore, is my inspiration.
I am, however, no Pablo Casals of the Homeric hexameter. It will suffice, all the same, if I shall demonstrate the complex of musical patterning and variety expressed by the prosodic arrangement of Homer’s words, to the point where a genuine musician responds to the presence of real music—with the ambition to come to terms with it and improve, even perfect, its performance. Under such a purview the findings, such as they are, of merely metrical analysis will be properly reduced to necessary features of the time signature, denoted, as today, outside and prior to the melodies themselves. He or she will recognise in the lung and the larynx that this is a composition that must be prepared—thought through and vocally prepared—before performance.
We do not even broach here the vision of a soloist in his theatre: becoming different characters, men and women, young and old in direct speech; nuancing the narration; drawing immense vistas in which to immerse his audience without special effects, scene changes and mood-altering soundtracks of string orchestras punctuated by brass; with only a staff or wand for a prop. But in the post-20th-Century world, the only way to begin to reclaim this vision engaged by the Homeric rhapsode is first to abandon one of the 20th-Century academy’s most buffoonish dogmas: to find out first-hand that the Homeric poems have nothing to do, in their source, their melodies or their nature—nothing whatsoever—with composition-in-performance.
I wrote the following about repetition in Homer, one of the original features of Homeric verse once felt to be in need of explanation, in terms of the formulaic metrical language required to make possible oral composition-in-performance:
It is simply a mystery how twentieth-century scholars, who are the inheritors of perhaps the greatest of all musical traditions, that of the modern West, should have become so transfixed by repetition in the unambiguously musical medium of Homer’s verse. The ancient world seems not to have noticed that Homer was repetitive. Many modern readers, for their part, seem to find the song-like recurrence, even in translation, to be one of the most pleasing features of Homer’s style as a storyteller. In a passage discussing the rhetorical effects of repetition, Aristotle only mentions Homer to observe the repetition of the name of the otherwise obscure Nireus, three times at the beginning of successive lines in the Iliad (Rhetoric 1414a; Iliad II.671-3). Aristotle is bemused by what is in his view a poet’s conscious use of a powerful auditory effect to memorialise a man whom he never mentions again. We should mark the fact that it is only in these lines that Aristotle anywhere actually hears and responds to repetition in Homer; and the fact that he chooses a passage out of the Catalogue of Ships, where, from the perspective of the written text, there is formulaic repetition all around. Clearly, Homer knew how to sound like he was repeating himself; and he did not sound like he was doing this when he used recurrent combinations of names and epithets.6
There are numbers of performers of baroque and classical music, and an audience with them, who chafe at ‘taking the repeats.’ It is a principle work of Homer’s rhapsode to evoke presences, of various kinds and dimensions. If he sings a person or a thing, not with their simple name but in their full rhythm, flush with what we call their ‘epithets’, and rather than summoning their real presence, he sounds like he is repeating himself—in a way that needs excusing by the inherent limitations and constraints involved in an imputed oral composing—then he has failed.
Does Homer fail? Sing him. Take the repeats. Try it out for yourself. Does Homer nod?
I shall be displaying a Greek text of Homer for each performed segment of the Odyssey, where the syllables determined to be prominent by the new theory of the Greek accent are set in boldface. This determination is not univocal; there are times when the theory allows for a choice of emphasis between adjacent syllables; the ictus of the metre especially, and external pressure often put by the hexameter on syllabic quantities, influences the judgement. But judgement in such matters has always been key to the transmission, by historical individuals, of the Homeric text now extant. I presume to assume a place in this transmission. I shall make the case (in ensuing sections) that the Roman-era manuscripts represent a proposition about the Homeric text, one perhaps not properly recognised as such by modern editors and commentators; and my added graffiti will treat this proposition as a lemma, an assumption, in its own demonstration: a concrete visual guide to the reality of Homer’s word music for those handicapped by literacy.
David
Endnote:
see A. P. David, ‘Seven Fatal Flaws in the Derivation of the Dactylic Hexameter from Aeolic Cola’, Classica: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos (2012), 101-24.
A summary: ‘[T]he derivation of the Homeric hexameter out of smaller colometric ‘units’ fails because 1) there is no typological basis given for such a derivation of a line; 2) the study of comparative metrics, on analogy with comparative reconstruction in historical linguistics, is bogus; 3) the Sesame Street test fails when one compares Sanskrit eight-syllable forms with glyconics; 4) the basis for linking the comparanda (variation prior to invariance) is so broad as to link each of them to most known verse forms; 5) the rhythmic sense of the metres is unrelated and positively dissimilar [only the Greek version contains a dacytl];hence rendering implausible the possibility of a common parent; and 6) lyric cola, the supposed elemental constituents of the hexameter, do not in extant examples display the phonological and morphological adaptations characteristic of the Homeric text. The [supposed] child is a monster! As an absurdist corollary [to 6)], 7) Homeric diction and phraseology, and therefore Homeric poetry, is definitively non-traditional [in that the original phrases born from Aeolics would not have shown such phonological and morphological modifications].’ (123-4).
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.
Paul Maas, Greek Metre, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, 3-4.
Antoine Meillet, Les Origines indo-européennes des mètres grecs, 1923, Paris, 57.
A. P. David, The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 158.
see M. L. West, ‘The Singing of Homer and the Modes of Early Greek Music’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 101 (1981), 113-14, passim.
David, The Dance of the Muses, 49-50.