Description
Book SynopsisThis book explains the nature of Roman comedy's music and provides musical analyses of songs, scenes and whole plays. This book will be of interest to students of ancient theatre and Latin literature, scholars and students working on the history of music and theatre, and performers working with ancient plays.
Trade Review'Awesome in scope and ambition …' Greek and Roman Musical Studies
'This excellent book is essential for all serious readers of Plautus and Terence, and for anyone interested in ancient music. Scholars of Atic comedy and tragedy will also greatly benefit from its methodologies.' Timothy Power, Phoenix
'This book is well-organized and thorough. Its depth and breadth are remarkable, demonstrating equal comfort with nitty-gritty particularities of Latin elision or hiatus, with comparative evidence and supplementation of textual or evidentiary lacunae. Moore's book enhances its reading of comedy's performance conditions by drawing on Latin oratory and rhetoric, lexicography, Greek musical theory, and Roman historiography, plus a bevy of outside material including Japanese kyōgen, Broadway musicals, Western opera, Yugoslavian epic, Javanese gamelan shadow-puppet theater, and folk-music traditions of Greece, Sicily, Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East. This breadth is matched by careful, cautious use of sources.' T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Tibiae and tibicines; 2. Song; 3. Dance; 4. Melody and rhythm; 5. Meters; 6. Arrangement of verses and variation within the verse; 7. Musical structure; 8. Polymetry; 9. Pseudolus; 10. Adelphoe; Conclusion; Appendix I. The meters of Roman comedy; Appendix II. Characters and meters; Appendix III. Musical features by play; Appendix IV. Exceptions to the ABC pattern; Appendix V. Polymetric passages.
