Gusle. Photo from Lord (2000) CD
Structural
Sympathies in Ancient Greek
and South-Slavic Heroic Song
Gusle. Photo from Lord (2000) CD |
Until the twentieth century, it scarcely occurred to scholars that the Homeric poems were musical documents. Today, of course, it is well known that oral narrative song traditions, though mostly evanescent, have survived in many parts of the world, and in others did so until very recently. In the nineteenth century, however, when ethnographers first began to gather such material, these traditions were virtually unknown. The collectors’ designation of such singing as "folk music" was telling: archaic forms, once esteemed by all classes of an ethnic group, can survive longer in geographical and social spheres less subject to the cultural ferment of court and city. Oral composition survived in isolated areas not because it was peasant music, but because these populations remained illiterate longer than urban society (Lord 1960: 6, 20). In early twentieth-century Europe, the gulf between the scholarly world and the traditional oral poet was so wide that one may speak of real discoveries. Bartók himself, despite years of energetic field work in the Balkans, would remark to Kodály of South-Slavic heroic song, "it is almost incredible that up to now I hardly had any idea that this last vestige of folk minstrelsy still flourishes in our neighborhood" (ap. Erdely 1995: 1 and n.1). |
| Bartók was introduced to this material in America during the war, having accepted an appointment at Columbia University, where he was to make transcriptions of material in the Milman Parry collection at Harvard. Parry had assembled this famous archive to test his hypothesis that Homer had been an illiterate oral poet. The curious phraseological repetitions of Greek epic diction which had puzzled generations of scholars were, he argued, traditional formulae that were used by the poet as an aid to spontaneous composition during performance. Parry’s untimely death in 1935 left the burden of proof to his student Albert Bates Lord, who fulfilled the charge in an admirable series of studies culminating in the influential Singer of Tales (1960). Our understanding of Homer’s compositional process continues to be refined, and many scholars still maintain that literacy had some effect on the ultimate formulation of the Iliad and the Odyssey as we have them (see e.g. Knox 1990: 19-22). Nevertheless, it is now so widely accepted that these poems are at least largely derived from a living, preliterate poetic tradition that the label ‘hypothesis’, though still conventional, should be discarded. |
|
 Greek Lyrist, early seventh century National Museum Athens #313 |
Parry’s
was not the first collection of sung narrative, though in method and
technology it far excelled all previous work. In the early nineteenth
century, performances of Russian bylina had been collected by
Danilov, and later by Rybnikov (Reichl 2000a: 1 ff.). Parry himself had
been exposed to the South-Slavic material by Matija Murko, a "true
pioneer" (Lord 1960: 280) who had undertaken extensive field-work in
Yugoslavia before the First World War. But it was Parry who brought the
material to bear on Greek epic, and thereby forced Classical scholars
to confront the musical implications of such Homeric invocations as
"Sing, Goddess, the Wrath of Achilles". |
| Yet these
further analogies are used mostly in the study of narrative technique
(story structure, formulaic diction, composition by theme) and
performance context, while for years rhythm and melody—let us call them
the ‘musical’ aspects of epic—received relatively little attention (cf.
Anderson 1994: 43). These areas are finally being explored by
ethnomusicologists (a good survey of current research is Reichl
2000)—while the interest of a few classicists (West 1981, 1986; Foley
1999: 71; Nagy 2000; Hagel 1994) should keep the issue visible in that
field as well. A major hindrance has been the inaccessibility of archival material. Where transcriptions are available, these are a poor substitute for hearing the actual music. And yet for sixty-five years, though it is the most extensive such collection that exists, none of the Parry recordings was made public, and the melodic art of the guslar was known only from the few transcriptions by Bartók (Lord/Bartók 1951). These are renowned for their great accuracy, with every ornament, glide, shout, shortening, lengthening, and microtonal inflection meticulously notated. And yet the very brilliance of these scores poses another obstacle, for while they demonstrate how very different South-Slavic musical conceptions are to our own, their level of detail obscures more basic structural patterns, both conscious and unconscious, which are second-nature to the singer. It was half a century before this small corpus was supplemented by simpler transcriptions of three complete epics (Erdely 1995). Finally, with the second edition of A Singer of Tales in 2000, Harvard released sound samples of the various poems discussed by Lord, as well as brief and priceless film footage of Avdo Mededovic, Parry’s ‘Yugoslav Homer’ (shown above). Thus research into the melody of South Slavic heroic song, though still in its infancy, can at last proceed with higher hopes. In this study I defend the legitimacy of comparing the melodic arts of the Serbo-Croatian and ancient Greek singers. It is important to realize that I am not comparing or reconstructing actual melodies, however—the connection between the two traditions is much too remote for that—but deducing the general features of a melodic method. This is done against the background of their common Indo-European ancestry. "Structural Sympathies in Ancient Greek and South-Slavic Heroic Song is forthcoming in E. Hickmann and R. Eichmann (eds.), Music Archeological Sources: Artifacts, Oral Tradition, Written Evidence, Serie Studien zur Musikarchäologie, Orient-Archäologie (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Berlin, Orient-Abteilung, Berlin, 2004. GET PDF LINKS SELECTIVE
BIBLIOGRAPHY |
