I agree. Unfortunately I don’t have a phorminx (those 4-stringed lyre thingys), or the ability to use one. So anything I do will only be a guide for those wanting to sing it themselves, not a proper performance.
There’re a few odd things about that performance, though. He does seem to sing unnaturally high. So much so that you couldn’t imagine him singing at any great volume. As a result of that, he also sings quite fast. That would make it difficult for any bard to remember the next verse fast enough.
It’s sounds as if he’s trying to match his voice to the pitch of the phorminx. I’d be surprised if there was any written evidence to support that.
This may be intentional. I have this idea in my brain (it might have come from a book - it might not have, I cannot recall) that Greek and Roman public speaking was pitched higher to cut through ambient noise better. Without amplification, everything that helps you be heard is good.
hi eureka, taking into account all the qualifications i give to the old model above here’s how line 1 would go, if qea\ was grave (i.e. following the Perseus rather than OCT reading):
the evidence (at least as i read it) shows that graves tack on to the front of a word the way enclitics tack on to the end. so qea\ Phlhia/ would be a steadily rising sequence of syllables, with the last syllable as the highest pitch.
re catathesis and anathesis, you can read Avery Andrews’ summary of Devine and Stephens:
also you can see D&S itself. they show that, like other pitch languages today, accented pitches in a clause drop successively, and then anathesis is the word Andrews uses to name the pattern just in ancient greek that, after a grave-accented word, the next accent is higher than normal.
quickly re the other things, West (in the best authority on greek music) said that greek music from all the ancient descriptions was most probably more high-pitched than we’d expect, given the things it was comapred to, and i think it’s accepted by all scholars in this area that the pitch of the singing rigidly follows the instrumental in non-strophic music, west talks about this and so do the other books on greek music.
I have to say, the higher pitch works well for lines whose last syllable has an acute (especially line 7). Since the pitch is already high, the climb at the end doesn’t feel unnatural.
Seeing as the pitch is the same as that of the phorminx (or moreover, the kithara), it may be possible to be certain about which key to use. Is it known exactly what the notes on these instruments were?
As for the qualifications, I realise that the system is not known for certain. On the other hand, it’s likely to be heavily related to reality.
It’s good to see (on that site you linked to, Chad) that the Greeks probably had a little pitch freedom. Therefore, while the position of the pitch drops would have dictated by Homer (excluding the inevitable changes to his poems over time), some notes can surely be changed by a semi-tone or so according to the bard. So, there is more than one way to be technically correct.
hi eureka, they’d be as i’ve done them in the actual document…, i.e. [C] would change to [E], i.e. if you follow OCT and other’s edition, with commas around the qea/, then the pitch resets at the start of qea/ and at the start of Phlhia/dew.
re the musical key, i’ve never been able to find a definitive answer on this, i’ve looked through west and others; my best guess based on the age of homer and what we know about ancient greek musical history and theory of scales is that it’d be in the enharmonic scale keyed to the Dorian mode. even this doesn’t give precision, since there were several “dorian modes”. I’m sure it would have been described somewhere random in greek literature, maybe in one of the literary critics or in the Deipnosophists or something it’ll be identified…
Oops, I hadn’t noticed those letters on the bottom of each line.
OK, I’ve tried reconstructing line 1 with a grave. I’m not sure when we switch from one letter to the next (which particularly affects the 2nd syllable of “Phlhiadew”).
What I get, using your numbering system, is:
mh 2-5 nin 4 a 3 ei 4 de 3 qe 2 a 1 Ph 3 lh 3 (or perhaps 4) i 2 a 1 dew 4 A 3 xi 2 lh 2-4 os 5
It’s basically the same as with the acute, but from “ei” to “Ph” each note is one tone higher.
Does this look right to you, or have I misunderstood something?
Also, are you sure about the end of line 19 (the way it goes down on the 2nd syllable of ἱκέσθαι, despite having an acute there)?
hi eureka, if you treat “1” as the top pitch as you did above, i’d do it this way if qea/ was grave (the red numbers are the ones which i’ve changed):
mh 2-5 nin 4 a 3 ei > 5 > de > 6 > qe > 6 > a > 5 > Ph > 4 > lh 3 i 2 a 1 dew 4 A 3 xi 2 lh > 1> -4 os 5
also nb the 2nd syllable of mh=nin should really be 6. but there’s a phenomenon called secondary rise which is statistically significant in extant greek music: if the interval between the last syllable of a word and the next syllable is more than a certain amount (1.5 tones if i remember), then that last syllable of that first word is higher, rather than lower, than the penultimate. it’s unclear in my model how many of the 7 pitch levels you need to have as an interval for this to occur, particularly when you take into account different scales having different intervals between the notes. that’s why i marked it above as “maybe”.
Ah, cheers. I see the mistake I was making. I’ll keep reconstructing lines until I consistently get the same results you did.
That secondary rise must be present in this line, because regardless of whether thea has an acute or a grave, “nin” cannot be at 6. If it were, then the first syllable of “aeide” would sound completely out of place.
(It’s easy to justify things like this retrospectively, of course, but in this case, the line would be almost unpronounceable without the secondary rise.)
hi Eureka, i don’t know if it’d help but i just put on that old temp web site an updated pitch document which i did in october last year, where i changed the way i annotated the pitch to make it more logical and to show what was happening.
i also just put the first few lines of the acharnians on, to show you how i personally use the pitch model now: i.e. not to map out the whole music for a text, but just to quickly chart in excel the first few lines of a new poetry style i’m studying, to see how the rhythm and pitch might go together. it’s a hideous .pdf since the unicode didn’t .pdf but i thought it might be useful to see what (limited) use i make of it now, for this purpose i still use it; i’m not going to fix up the .pdf though because it’s just a copy of my working notes.
I like this new guide, the logic is easy to follow.
I have a question about emphatic words, though… In line 7:
’Ατρεϊ/δης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος ’Αχιλλεύς
It looks like the emphatic words, ’ατρεΐδης and ’αχιλλεῠς, are spoken like lifted by grave words. And then τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν are also spoken like lifted by grave words because of their association with ’ατρεΐδης. Do these emphatic words consist of all proper names, or just the names of heros and gods?
What I can’t figure out is, in the previous line, why ἐξ οὗ isn’t a tone higher than it is. It looks as if it’s already been through one catathesis. It that the effect of the proclitic?
hi Eureka, you’re right about proper names, they (like accents after grave-accented words) are pitched higher than the “standard” pitch peak, i’ve got a page ref on that old pitch model i think to Devine and Stephens.
you can see then that a)/nac and a)ndrw=n aren’t emphasised: each has a pitch peak a note lower than the peak of the last word, that’s what catathesis is.
as to what types of names this applies to, i can’t remember if devine and stephens specified, e.g. people’s names, names of cities &c. if you look in that section of D&S they might say; i doubt there’s enough evidence to say though.
re line 6, there’s no catathesis. it’s anathesis: at that stage i inferred from d&s’s statement that proclitics most likely have grave accentuation that they give rise to the “lifted by grave” phenomenon which a andrews calls anathesis.
all the way from the first syll. to the first accent of a lexical word (i.e. prw=ta) you have a steady rise. another uncertainty here is how to treat non-lexical circumflexes in this steady rise.
Thanks for your help, Chad. But I have at least a couple more questions…
If I understand correctly, ἐξ οὗ is so low because the 2nd note of ου{ must be lower than δὴ, which must be lower than τὰ, and so on?
If that’s the case, then I take it the aforementioned anathesis is on the word πρῶτα?
In which case, why isn’t ου{ similarly affected by anathesis? Is that some characteristic of those sorts of pronouns?
Sort of off topic… D&S is turning out to be a difficult book to get a hold of. The university’s library doesn’t seem to have it. (It has a very sparse Greek section.)
If I understand correctly, e0c ou{ is so low because the 2nd note of ou{ must be lower than dh, which must be lower than ta, and so on?
If that’s the case, then I take it the aforementioned anathesis is on the word prw~ta?
yep
In which case, why isn’t ou{ similarly affected by anathesis? Is that some characteristic of those sorts of pronouns?
anathesis only applies to lexical words: non-lexs are included in the run-up to the first lexical accent.
Have you got the “lifted by grave lexicals” and “lifted by grave non-lexicals” labelled the wrong way around on the new pitch model?
not as far as i can see, the pitch drop after a lexical anathesis (i.e. lifted by lexical grave) is smaller than the pitch drop after a non-lexical anathesis (i.e. lifted by non-lexical grave). that’s the same as on my old pitch model, and i have a page reference there to Devine and Stephens on this
In defense of Mr. Lombardo, I’ll say that he’s the only one who doesn’t put me to sleep by the end of line 3.
One of the guys I’ve heard used to play a part in Star Trek as a Klingon.
One of the pitchers I heard sounded like a robot. It took me a while to figure out that I wasn’t listening to the product of an automatic greek reciting program. I would beg him to stop insulting Homer and do his pronunciation exercises (a noble pursuit) with, say, Tucídides.
All of the stressers, including Mr. L, disregard the hexametric rhythm completely. That´s a shame, because that rhythm is the only thing about Homer that we can be sure about (excuse my grammar).
Pitchers do better with rhythm, but when I read along tapping at every arsis, the resulting taps are far from rhythmic. There’s a tendency to rush through the dactyls, making their long vowels short.
Pitchers tend to sound emotionally dead. From their intonation, you wouldn’t know whether Hector is holding his son or smashing greek skulls.
So, I’ll give the golden apple to the pitcher who can keep the rhythm and figures out a way to combine pitch with phrase intonation. I know that you can do it, folks!
To really sing well is not an easy skill, and in fact requires a natural ability. Classicists are not chosen for their ability to sing, so we can’t be too pickey. (What’s more, I think they are more interested in technique than performance.)
Stressing is much easier, because it’s what we do in our native languages. If we pronounce it like our native language, we can easily apply our own language’s phrase intonation to it.
However, I think to do that would be a cop-out. Most things that are worth doing require effort, and many of them are too difficult for some.
How to do this phrase intonation is a good question. I suspect that more important words would be slightly louder (just like in modern singing), so:
Eureka, I was commenting on the talkers, not the singers. I wouldn’t hold against anyone attempting to sing the Iliad his/her lack of a good singing voice. Wait until you hear me (not pretty).
Before I found this forum I heard a guy singing the Iliad. I didn’t write down the url, but you might have heard him also: a guy with a Greek name from an English university that plays an electric lyre. Well, his first line (I.1) stuck in my head, and the other day, looking at chad’s pitch (or note ?) wave charts, I could swear that both matched perfectly (if I understood the chart right). Coincidence?
i’ve never heard it; the only person who has said that they’ve looked at my old pitch stuff is eureka. since i can’t access media files online anymore could somebody please try to find it (that one which bardo talked about) and let us know whether it’s good, and also this one?
(It has a very sparse Greek section.)