On Odyssey 10.408-502

An especially happy discovery of these attempts at video presentations of my performance notes for Homer’s Odyssey, is that one can, with a little post-production, present a Greek text simultaneous with its performance. (The other is the experience of trawling the internet for the stimulus of images to lose oneself in.) Once one gets the hang of the Greek alphabet, I hope the experience can become like following along with a score while listening to a piece of music. (Some of you have already been doing this, following along, with my six-volume Greek/English edition of the Odyssey, Homer Odysseia.) I find that the awakening of the analytic mind, when it is presented with a composer’s (or compositor’s) stream of symbols and notation, does no harm to the hearing, but rather can enhance one’s awareness of form and metabolism in the unfolding composition. Others may disagree, and close all books and other avenues of distraction while listening. In either case, taking on board the notion that ancient texts should all be approached for what they were, musical scores for the production of meaningful sound by the voice, does far more than enhance a private experience. From my recent book:

We did not use to know how the prosody of Greek words interacted with Greek metres. With the arrival of the new theory of the Greek accent, now we do. The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know.

Not knowing how the once painstakingly recorded accents worked, led to a non-benign, positive kind of ignorance in classical scholarship, which has fostered and continues to peddle notions of metrical composition and metrical poetry. These are patent absurdities now force-fed on students. Ancient metres can instead be compared to the time signatures we find in the modern musical notation; they sit to the left, while we all know that the music is to be found in what follows to the right of the time signature, in the pitch patterns and stresses, the notes of melody and the punctuating bar lines. The independence from the metre of the accentual patterns in Greek allowed for the phenomenon of syncopation, the source of the sense of rhythm in all things musical. Syncopation with its rhythmic counterpoint in turn brings new attention to moments of cadence, where accents and metrical downbeats conjoin through the words expressing them.

So do enjoy Homer’s syncopations. They are lost on classical scholars, who scan ancient verses like metrical robots, and spin spiders’ webs of metrical traditions with no evidence from history or payoff in the form of compositional insight. The dactylic hexameter is not a metrical prison, but a template or matrix of musical freedom, as real words complete with their pitches and stresses—not metrical phrases—bring life to the metrical matrix in the telling of a story.

The quickest way to Hades is to miss out on Homer’s cheated expectations, when he draws his sword from by his thick thigh. That comic drop, and its opening eyes, are what he’s after.

Here is my original post, with complete recordings of the passage in Greek and English:

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