the finished product is fascinating, more so if you could work up a performance, a professional one, to demonstrate. let's hear those phat Teutonic beats! i have zero clue on the subject, so maybe it's been done? But the journey to the end....I confess: sleepy time. You didn't get to that point w/o grappling with a subject i've always hated: meter. in any language. kudos to you. i learned just enough classical meter not to embarrass myself completely in Homer and Ovid. thanks for the discussion of dactyls. I didn't have to think so hard about that one. (isn't Krasis the guy who fought the rebel slave Sparta?) anyway, do we have much knowledge on the history of performance? who would perform? what instruments? a solo performer or ensemble? any women performing?
We don't know much about performance. General opinion is that stuff like Beowulf would have been performed solo by a bard, accompanying himself with a stringed instrument -- lyre or harp. We have the Sutton Hoo harp, with its six strings, which argues for a pentatonic scale -- unsurprising, of course; very common cross-culturally. Minor or major pentatonic, we don't know, since all the strings are the same length, so pitch would have been entirely a matter of tuning. How voice and harp interacted, no idea. No evidence that I'm aware of for women performing in public.
yes, I kind of figured that about an individual and an instrument, cf what's his name, Demodocus? at Odysseus' palace in Homer. the bard there. anyway, the play is the thing, but all we have is the text. why is that? why do we have the words and not the musical techniques of the Iliad? or Psalms? or Oedipus? or the Homeric Hymns? and so on. we assume their musical technique was not quite so sophisticated, but they were dancing, chanting/singing, and playing instruments, while doing dramatic business, in those ridiculously complex Greek choruses of Aeschylus and co. imitating frogs, etc. "Hey ho, the wind and the rain!" how was that performed? much audience participation, like you suggest about Beowulf? maybe more was going on in performance and we get the simplified, ie the nothing, version of performance technique? anyway, what if we only had the text of Butterfly, using the "Tutti Zitti" as an example? only the words, only the libretto? even if we knew a bit about instruments and musical scales and techniques and such? is this a fair analogy?
Our situation for say Homer or Beowulf is pretty much like your Puccini analogy. For later Greek stuff, the dramatists and so on, and the lyric, we know something about the scales and harmonic theory and so on, but we're very far from knowing what a performance was like.
i wish i knew more about music to ask you about your musical interpretation...how does one translate musically the first word, then opening lines, of the Iliad? what is "authentic historically-informed" performance of something like Beowulf? is such a concept even meaningful today, for something like Beowulf? anyway, did you ever get to hear live an attempt at a performance?
I guess football and ICE detentions have replaced massacres in Frisia for the most part. Has the movie & TV series (Friday Night Lights), and perhaps the popular song, replaced the epic poem? I know smatterings of mainly five languages, including Anishinaabemowin and Cebuano, as well as English, Spanish & French, and have mainly noticed the differences in pronouns and prepositions (English seems to have much complexity). Obviously the epic poem is not lost to you. But what's become of the rest of us?
the finished product is fascinating, more so if you could work up a performance, a professional one, to demonstrate. let's hear those phat Teutonic beats! i have zero clue on the subject, so maybe it's been done? But the journey to the end....I confess: sleepy time. You didn't get to that point w/o grappling with a subject i've always hated: meter. in any language. kudos to you. i learned just enough classical meter not to embarrass myself completely in Homer and Ovid. thanks for the discussion of dactyls. I didn't have to think so hard about that one. (isn't Krasis the guy who fought the rebel slave Sparta?) anyway, do we have much knowledge on the history of performance? who would perform? what instruments? a solo performer or ensemble? any women performing?
We don't know much about performance. General opinion is that stuff like Beowulf would have been performed solo by a bard, accompanying himself with a stringed instrument -- lyre or harp. We have the Sutton Hoo harp, with its six strings, which argues for a pentatonic scale -- unsurprising, of course; very common cross-culturally. Minor or major pentatonic, we don't know, since all the strings are the same length, so pitch would have been entirely a matter of tuning. How voice and harp interacted, no idea. No evidence that I'm aware of for women performing in public.
yes, I kind of figured that about an individual and an instrument, cf what's his name, Demodocus? at Odysseus' palace in Homer. the bard there. anyway, the play is the thing, but all we have is the text. why is that? why do we have the words and not the musical techniques of the Iliad? or Psalms? or Oedipus? or the Homeric Hymns? and so on. we assume their musical technique was not quite so sophisticated, but they were dancing, chanting/singing, and playing instruments, while doing dramatic business, in those ridiculously complex Greek choruses of Aeschylus and co. imitating frogs, etc. "Hey ho, the wind and the rain!" how was that performed? much audience participation, like you suggest about Beowulf? maybe more was going on in performance and we get the simplified, ie the nothing, version of performance technique? anyway, what if we only had the text of Butterfly, using the "Tutti Zitti" as an example? only the words, only the libretto? even if we knew a bit about instruments and musical scales and techniques and such? is this a fair analogy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSqbQpGkj48
Our situation for say Homer or Beowulf is pretty much like your Puccini analogy. For later Greek stuff, the dramatists and so on, and the lyric, we know something about the scales and harmonic theory and so on, but we're very far from knowing what a performance was like.
i wish i knew more about music to ask you about your musical interpretation...how does one translate musically the first word, then opening lines, of the Iliad? what is "authentic historically-informed" performance of something like Beowulf? is such a concept even meaningful today, for something like Beowulf? anyway, did you ever get to hear live an attempt at a performance?
lhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WcIK_8f7oQ&t=276s
I guess football and ICE detentions have replaced massacres in Frisia for the most part. Has the movie & TV series (Friday Night Lights), and perhaps the popular song, replaced the epic poem? I know smatterings of mainly five languages, including Anishinaabemowin and Cebuano, as well as English, Spanish & French, and have mainly noticed the differences in pronouns and prepositions (English seems to have much complexity). Obviously the epic poem is not lost to you. But what's become of the rest of us?
No.
Tell me more.