Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Weiss offers us a new way of seeing how choruses are central characters in Euripides’ late plays, even when they seem at first glance far removed from what is going on around them. Her work is an excellent example of the current revolution in the study of ancient music, which is refuting definitively the facile assumption that tragedy's music in unknowable and therefore uninteresting." * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
“[This] work is highly valuable. It will add depth of understanding to those interested in Euripides and Greek tragedy, and the role of
mousikê in a variety of genres. It adds a new perspective on debate regarding the nature of the New music and provides extra dimension to the currently voguish focus on the role of the chorus. Most critically, it relocates the reader through time and space, allowing at least a glimpse of the immersive choral culture for which we are in want.”
-- Matthew Shipton * The Classical Review *
"This outstanding book is the first entirely devoted to Euripidean music." * Greek and Roman Musical Studies *
"An elegiac tone runs through NaomiWeiss’ careful, learned, and compelling book, a subtle basso ostinato suggesting that Euripides’ late tragedies can never be experienced as vividly or as urgently as they once were. I recommend her book both for its masterful display of scholarly skill and for this moving and provocative sense of loss." * Classical Philology *
"As Weiss fills the silence of music lost with a symphony of images and sounds, Greek mousikē emerges as a cognitively demanding and complex synaesthetic practice." * Theatre Journal *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Abbreviations
Note on Editions and Translations
Introduction: In Search of Tragedy’s Music
1. Words, Music, and Dance in Archaic Lyric and Classical Tragedy
Before Tragedy: Imaginative Suggestion in Archaic Choral Lyric
Metamusical Play in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Early Euripides
2. Chorus, Character, and Plot in Electra
Electra and the Chorus
Performed Ecphrasis
Choral Anticipation and Enactment
3. Musical Absence in Trojan Women
The Paradox of Absent Choreia
New Songs and Past Performances
Performing the Fall of Troy
4. Protean Singers and the Shaping of Narrative in Helen
Birdsong and Lament
New Music
Travel and Epiphany
5. From Choreia to Monody in Iphigenia in Aulis
Spectatorship, Enactment, and Desire
Past and Present Mousike
Choreia and Monody
Conclusion: Euripides’ Musical Innovations
Works Cited
General Index
Index Locorum
