Pitch Accents as Melodic Data in Ancient Greek Texts: Digital Tools for Close and Distant Reading скачать в хорошем качестве

Pitch Accents as Melodic Data in Ancient Greek Texts: Digital Tools for Close and Distant Reading

Anna Conser (University of Cincinnati), Pitch Accents as Melodic Data in Ancient Greek Texts: Digital Tools for Close and Distant Reading. Digital Classicist London (Online only) Fri, July 12, 2024. In the songs of archaic and classical Greece, words and music were written in tandem and were closely coordinated both expressively and sonically. Because of this, textual sound patterns provide a useful source of data for understanding the musical design of songs written before the rise of formal music notation. This approach has long been applied as regards musical rhythm: metrical analysis is a standard method in the interpretation of lyric texts. Recently, there has been growing interest in the possibility that a similar approach should be taken with lexical pitch accents, taken as marking rises and falls in the original sung melody (e.g. Nagy 2000; Wachter 2006; D’Angour 2018; Abritta 2021). Because pitch accents are encoded in the text, digital tools can assess this question quantitatively at a large scale, by comparing the accent patterns of lyric stanzas originally sung to the same melody (Conser 2020). Similarly, they make it possible to identify passages of special musical importance and interpret them with reference to the melodic contours traced in the accents (Conser forthcoming). In my presentation, I will describe the methodological decisions underlying the digital tools I have created for this purpose, summarize the results of their application to my database of tragic lyric, and seek input on their future development and research applications. Works Cited Abritta, A. 2021. “A Glimpse at the Melody of Ibycus? Accent Distribution in Fr. 286 Page.” Illinois Classical Studies 46 (1): 163–75. D’Angour, A. 2018. “The Musical Setting of Ancient Greek Texts.” In D’Angour, A. and Phillips, T. eds. Music, Texts, and Culture in Ancient Greece. Oxford University Press. Conser, A. 2020. “Pitch Accent and Melody in Aeschylean Song.” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 8 (2): 254–78. ------. forthcoming. “Aiola Nux: The Musical Design of Sophocles’ Trachiniae.” Arethusa. Devine, A.M., and Stephens, L.D. 1994. Prosody of Greek Speech. Oxford University Press. Nagy, G. 2000. “Reading Greek Poetry Aloud: Evidence from the Bacchylides Papyri.” Quaderni Urbinati Di Cultura Classica 64 (1): 7–28. Wachter, R. 2006. “Accent, Sentence Intonation, and Music in Lesbian Dialect Poetry.” Incontri Linguistici 29: 1000–1010.