Euripides and the Sound of Music

Abstract

Performances of classical tragedies were musical events more akin to a modern opera or musical than to a theater play. The inherent metricality of the ancient Greek language gives rhythm a special claim to importance when considering ancient music. The allusions to music and to musical instruments lend a number of the choral passages in which they occur a self-referential quality, sometimes with unmistakeable implications for the song's performance. A much-debated question in Greek musical scholarship has been the question of how and to what extent the melodic shape was dictated or influenced by the pitch accents intrinsic to the pronunciation of Greek words. Greek music found on papyri and inscriptions dating from the third century BCE on exhibit a high degree of correspondence between melody and pitch accent, and evidence from other pitched languages show that correspondence of this kind is not uncommon.

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