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Date: | Sun, 22 Aug 1999 11:36:13 +0530 |
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I am attending a course on Greek Drama and was struck by the fact that the
role played by music in these plays is practically ignored by most critics
and we end up treating it like Shakespearean drama. A look at the Grove
encyclopedia gives me the dismal information that practically all ancient
music is lost to us(despite the fact that the Greeks had a system of
writing down music) and we have only about a thousand bars of surviving
music. I'm sure this music has been recorded - so could anyone suggest
recordings of this surviving corpus of 'Classical' music.
Second, even though the actual music is lost a lot of theoretical writing,
it seems, has come down to us. Now, has there ever been an attempt by
scholars to actually recreate as far as possible, from the music theory
and other historical evidence, the music of a Greek play. I think this
would be a vital step to our understanding the queer mixture of ritual,
dance, drama and music that was the Greek theatre.
It would atleast be an attempt at explaining what attending an actual play
at the theatre of Dionysus in Periclean Athens was like - would it have
seemed like an opera, or perhaps like some forms of ancient ritual drama
that survive in India - whetever it might have been, it seems to me that
it would certainly not be like Shakespeare in masks and long robes.
Does anyone know of such a scholarly reconstruction? Any suggestions about
audio/video recordings?
Thanks for any help,
Anupam.
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