Proefschrift--Groningen. / "Stellingen" inserted at end. Includes bibliographical references.

The musical analysis of Greek tragedy has traditionally been limited to studies of meter and metatheatrical language. This dissertation seeks to establish a new approach to ancient dramatic song by demonstrating that the linguistic pitch accents of tragic lyrics often trace the melodic contours of their lost musical settings. In the papyri and inscriptions that preserve music notation alongside Greek lyrics, intonation and melody are often coordinated according to set principles, which are well established by previous scholarship. Through the creation of software that applies these historical principles to tragic texts, I demonstrate that stanzas sung to the same melody are significantly more similar in their accentual contours than control groups that do not share a melody. In many instances, the accents of these paired texts consistently trace the same pitch contours, allowing us to reconstruct the shape of the original melody with a high degree of confidence.After a general introduction, the dissertation’s first two chapters address the historical basis for this approach. Chapter 1 reviews the evidence for the musical structure of tragic song, confirming the widely held view that paired stanzas were generally set to the same melody. Chapter 2 turns to the evidence for the role of pitch accents in ancient Greek song, including the ancient testimony and musical documents, and a computational study of accent patterns across all the lyrics of Aeschylus’ surviving tragedies. The methodology developed in these first two chapters is applied in two case studies, in which I reconstruct and interpret the accentual melodies of select tragic lyrics. Chapter 3 analyzes the musical design of the chorus’ entrance song in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, along with sections of the Kommos from Choephori. In both cases, I argue, melody would play an integral role in highlighting the themes of repetition and reversal within the Oresteia. Chapter 4 turns to the music of Euripides’ Medea, a play that has been central to previous discussions of accent in tragic music. Reading the lyrics and accentual melodies within the framework of musical history as understood in the fifth century bce, I argue that Euripides uses a contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ melodic styles to position his chorus at a turning point within literary history. In the dissertation’s final chapter, I address the reception of Medea’s music in a fragmentary comedy, the so-called Alphabet Tragedy of Callias. Together, these interpretive chapters provide a template for future work applying methods of musical analysis to the accentual melodies of ancient Greek song.

Contrairement à la lamentation rituelle, les lamentations tragiques sont réalisées dans un large éventail de situations. En effet, elles peuvent avoir lieu avant l’événement déploré, porter sur d’autres malheurs qu’un décès, ou encore lamenter le sort de la personne même qui mène la lamentation. Cette variété de contextes est vraisemblablement à l’origine de la grande diversité de formes et de contenus des lamentations que l’on trouve dans le corpus tragique. De quelle façon les tragédiens modifient-ils la forme traditionnelle de la lamentation ? Ces modifications dépendent-elles d’éléments contextuels particuliers ? Pour répondre à ces questions, j’examinerai trois passages : Cassandre dans l’Agamemnon d’Eschyle, Créon dans l’Antigone de Sophocle et Polymestor dans l’Hécube d’Euripide. Ces trois lamentations ont lieu dans des contextes très différents, notamment en ce qui concerne l’identité du lamentant (genre, âge, statut social, ethnicité) et la relation que celui-ci entretient avec le Chœur. De surcroît, elles ont été composées par des auteurs et à des dates différentes, ce qui permettra de prendre en compte l’évolution de la forme au cours du Vème siècle avant J.-C. L’analyse suggère que la forme de la lamentation du personnage s’adapte surtout à son ethnicité et à son genre, tandis que la participation du Chœur dépend directement de sa relation avec le lamentant. Parfois, la stylistique est également influencée par le style propre à l’auteur ou par la date de composition de la pièce. Quant au contenu, les thèmes abordés sont principalement déterminés par la position et la fonction du passage dans la tragédie. Puisque les fonctions d’une lamentation tragique sont différentes de celles d’une lamentation rituelle, le modèle de la lamentation funèbre est insuffisant pour guider à lui seul l’analyse du contenu d’une lamentation tragique. / Unlike ritual laments, tragic laments take place in a wide range of situations. Some are made over troubles other than an actual death, over events that have not happened yet, or over the mourner himself. This seems to be why we find such a huge diversity of both forms and contents of laments within the tragic corpus. How do the tragic poets modify the traditional form of the lament? Do these changes depend on specific contextual elements? In order to answer these questions, I will examine three laments: Cassandra’s in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Creon’s in Sophocles’ Antigone and Polymestor’s in Euripides’ Hecuba. These three passages show major contextual discrepancies, especially when it comes to the identity of the mourner (gender, age, social status, ethnicity) and their relationship to the Chorus. Moreover, they were composed by different authors at different times, which accounts for the evolution of the literary form during the 5th century B.C. These contextual differences allow us to identify specific ties between the context and the lament itself. The form of the actor’s part depends mostly on the mourner’s ethnicity and gender, while the Chorus’ part suits its relationship with the mourner. The stylistics of the lament may also result from the author’s personal preferences or from the date of composition. As for the content, it is heavily determined by the position and the function of the passage within the play. As the functions of a tragic lament differ from those of a ritual lament, the model given by ritual lament cannot serve as the only basis for the analysis of a tragic lament’s content.

This dissertation claims contributions on two fronts. First, it aims to contribute to the theory of reception with a practical model of reading postclassical texts that substantially engage ancient ones. In the second place, it contributes three individual readings of three important works of literature on which nothing has been written by anglophone classicists working on classical reception: José Watanabe’s Antígona, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost. This dissertation’s contribution to the theory of reception is the proposition of a practical schema of reading, which is a figure upon which the imagination can operate. Simply put, it posits a schema as the place where meaning is construed. The schema calls attention to the constructedness of meaning and to the act of construction and organizes different moments of “reception”: that of the postclassical text receiving the ancient one (which the schema imagines as a vertical line) and that of the scholar receiving that particular instance of reception, the “I” of interpretation, which is theorized as one of two axes of transcendence of the schema (the other one being the world of/to which the schema speaks and means). Furthermore, the schema puts the “where” of meaning in the relation of (at least) two texts, but the “of” of meaning belongs to the postclassical texts. The postclassical text receiving ancient text(s) is proposed as a complex work, simultaneously in relationship with texts from the past as well as other texts from other periods. The relations of the postclassical text with each of these texts are different and need to be differently traced or theorized. The relation with the ancient texts is properly textual and thus the primary way of tracing it in the schema is a vertical line that first and foremost pays attention to form, with the tools of structural analysis and philology. Then, the theorization of the vertical line is made thicker with the operation of concepts upon it. As each of these texts (the classical and the postclassical) mean in relation to webs of texts that are relevant to the vertical relation, the schema imagines an additional dimension to the vertical one: the horizontal. Each of the horizontal lines traced for both the classical and the postclassical texts are in one way or another “historicist” readings, they trace contexts for the texts, but the way that context is understood in the theorization of the horizontal dimension of the schema is plural and never saturated. While this horizontal aspect of meaning is understood as textual, the schema also imagines for it an axis of transcendence, the world on which writers write and in which the reader is situated. The first chapter’s primary goal is to provide a reading of José Watanabe’s Antígona using the schema to illuminate the ways in which this text makes meaning in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone and part of the body of texts that have come to form part of that name. This reading counters the predominant approach to this work (and to many a work in classical reception), which reads it allegorically, as a commentary on a particular moment in the history of Peru. That predominant way of reading not only ignores the vertical orientation of the text in relation to its avowed ancient source, it also limits itself to one way of tracing the horizontality of the postclassical text, construing “context” in the most immediate and literal sense. The chapter contributes a reading that opens up Antígona to much more than allegory, highlighting its powerful affective and aesthetic dimension, as well as its intersection with recent feminist readings of the Greek tragedy that turn towards the figure of Ismene and the politics of sisterhood. The second chapter sets itself to the analysis of the complex role that ancient texts play in Christine Brooke-Rose’s radically experimental novel Amalgamemnon. This novel has not been the focus of attention of any work by a classical scholar, and those scholars who have written about it in other fields have failed to analyze the importance that Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon play at both the structural and the thematic levels. Tracing the vertical line, the chapter shows how these two texts are essential to the novel’s writing and themes. In the horizontal dimension, the schema situates the novel’s engagement with those ancient sources in the context of contemporary feminist discourse, especially as it concerns the question of the possibility of a feminine discourse and an outside of the phallocentric system of signs. That intersection illuminates both how Brooke-Rose is reading the ancient sources as well as what are arguably some of the limitations of her writing in contrast to the ethical commitments of feminisms. Finally, the third chapter is a reading of Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, a text that is perhaps better known than the texts treated in the previous two chapters, at least in the Anglophone world, but which has nonetheless been fairly disregarded in the scholarship. The chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the “work” of this text, of what it does and how it does it, as the scholarship on Carson’s work has failed to posit or satisfactorily respond to the important questions regarding what constitutes the undeniable originality of her writing. In this particular book, which combines academic and poetic discourses into a new form that partakes of both, Carson proposes a comparative mode of making meaning that cannot be captured with a structural analysis of inter- or -trans- textuality, as the previous two chapters construed the vertical dimension of the schema. Instead, the theory of metaphor developed by Paul Ricoeur provides the appropriate tool to imagine the vertical dimension of the schema and analyze Carson’s exercise in bringing an ancient and a modern author together. This particular construction of the schema brings into the terrain of classical reception the possibility of interpretating comparative works that do not fit nicely within the theoretical margins of this subfield of classical studies. Finally, the chapter provides the occasion to trace another aspect of the schema, its other axis of transcendence, which is the “I” of interpretation.