Pitch Accents as Melodic Data in Ancient Greek Texts: Digital Tools for Close and Distant Reading

https://youtu.be/yELkwC4SPOs
(Online only)

In the songs of archaic and classical Greece, words and music were written in tandem and were closely coordinated both expressively and sonically. Because of this, textual sound patterns provide a useful source of data for understanding the musical design of songs written before the rise of formal music notation. This approach has long been applied as regards musical rhythm: metrical analysis is a standard method in the interpretation of lyric texts. Recently, there has been growing interest in the possibility that a similar approach should be taken with lexical pitch accents, taken as marking rises and falls in the original sung melody (e.g. Nagy 2000; Wachter 2006; D’Angour 2018; Abritta 2021). Because pitch accents are encoded in the text, digital tools can assess this question quantitatively at a large scale, by comparing the accent patterns of lyric stanzas originally sung to the same melody (Conser 2020). Similarly, they make it possible to identify passages of special musical importance and interpret them with reference to the melodic contours traced in the accents (Conser forthcoming). In my presentation, I will describe the methodological decisions underlying the digital tools I have created for this purpose, summarize the results of their application to my database of tragic lyric, and seek input on their future development and research applications.