![]() ![]() The difference lies in the fact that altering the quantity of a final syllable, in a language with recessive accent, has a large impact on the prosody of a word πλάγχθη is a natural barytone on the ultima, in the parlance of the new theory with correption of the η due to hiatus, it becomes barytone on the penult. This is a common enough phenomenon not reflected in Homer’s modern editions. These boldings will illustrate what must become an admonition among trainees in classical Greek, as indeed it has already been in the course of this work: the most tonally, dynamically prominent syllables in a Greek text are not always the ones marked with an accent very often they are the syllables immediately following that complete the contonation.Īnother innovation in my corrected text will be a bias in favour of prodelision over elision. My present contribution to the cause, apart from posting recordings, will be posting my own ‘corrected’ version of the text alongside, using bold type to indicate the most prominent syllable in each word or prosodic unit. Who can tell what powers these poems still harbour, what epiphanies are yet to strike in bloom, as the music of an ancient world becomes vivid once again? The promise of such moments, actuated in harmony and rhythm, can now be a reward for the labours of learning Greek. ![]() The experience of epiphany πὰρ ποδί, ‘at the foot,’ is the ultimate aim of the art of χορεία and its summoning circles, whether in its epic or its lyric forms. ![]() The recording of this reinforcement and syncopation can now be recovered by correctly interpreting the instructions encoded in the accent marks written into East Roman manuscripts. The Greek ‘contonation’, married to the different sequences of quantities demarcating the ends of Greek words, produced the different dynamic prominences, characterised by one of two directions of pitch change and one of two quantities, plus intensity, that reinforced and syncopated the steps of the dance movement. But what made the whole thing choreia was the voice of the dancer, singing syllables not just determined by their relative quantity, but by their relative pitch and direction of pitch change. In Greek poetry, the relative quantities of syllables were made to match the long and short steps of the movement by the legs (πούς = ‘leg’, ‘foot’). In my book I highlight the rarity of such a shift in sung usage by citing a line from the song ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac: ‘When the rain washés you clean you’ll know’.Ģ In this respect English song is in some ways less liberal than Homer’s hexameter, where the metrical lengthening and shortening of syllables can shift the location of accentual prominence. But this is not true about the English stress accent, which is rarely shifted in song from its natural place inside words. In Greek there are naturally long vowels and syllables, but the quantities of English song syllables are assigned and almost completely determined by ictus and melody, not by nature even ‘a’, ‘the’ and ‘to’ can come in for lengthened or emphatic treatment (‘ the bombs bursting in air,’ ‘happy birthday to you!’). To claim therefore that the Beatles’ music is quantitative, is to focus on the playing of Ringo, and all but ignore the contributions to songwriting and performance of John, Paul and George. Time-relations of English song syllables are deployed in whole-number ratios. One should note that all of English song is quantitative in the same sense that Greek and Latin verse is. The composing of such danceable sequences of words came to be the work of someone called a ‘poet’, the product ‘poetry’. Singing Greek, to Greek dance measures, produced a phenomenon called choreia. This is as transparent a way as can be imagined to indicate what part of the human body performs the measurement: Greek metre is a measure of dance. The ancient usage, still current, is that the elements of metre are ‘feet’. This is not controversial, because the Greek language is obviously tonal, it has a pitch accent, and Greek poetry is made from Greek language. Greek verse is, first of all, tonal and accentual. This dictum is, at best, a misleading half-truth. We are taught that Greek verse is quantitative. It exists at a pre-musical level of the analysis of poetry. But it does, all of it, need to be reevaluated-remeasured, and chastened of its generative pretensions. This sometimes wilful delusion does not mean that more than a millennium of metrical analysis needs to be replaced. The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know. With the arrival of the new theory of the Greek accent, now we do. We did not use to know how the prosody of Greek words interacted with Greek metres.
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