Stopped on his way to the tragic competitions of the City Dionysia and asked where he was headed, the average classical Athenian in the street would very probably have replied, ‘‘es chorouS' (‘‘to the choruses’’) or perhaps ‘‘es tragOidouS' (‘‘to the tragos-singers’’). If he was quizzed further as to just how he would categorize this activity so beloved of his city, the term mousikO (the ‘‘craft of the Muses’’ and the origin of our ‘‘music’’) would have very soon entered the conversation. For the Athenians, tragedy was - fundamentally, predominantly, and persistently - a musical event.
Fundamentally, since - at least until the middle of the fifth century - tragedy was oriented around its singing-and-dancing heart, the chorus (choros), and (to dip our toes in the dangerous waters of origins) it was probably in the bifurcation of a single lead singer from a choral group that the distinctive double form of tragedy, with its individual actors and singing-dancing chorus, arose.
Predominantly, because the chorus, with its highly choreographed dance-songs performed by some twelve or fifteen elaborately costumed and masked men in the wide open space of the orchestra, must have been the dominant physical and aesthetic presence in tragedy, one that, unlike the actors, virtually never left the space that they entered at or near the start of a play. And even as the quantitative contribution of the chorus progressively declined over the course of the classical period, as though to counterbalance this musical loss, the actors began to sing more and more from the stage.
And persistently, because even centuries after the end of the most creative period of classical tragedy, audiences from Syracuse to Abdera and beyond clamored for the songs of Euripides as much as the speeches, to the extent that the craze could be deemed a national epidemic (see the fascinating story told by Lucian, How to Write History 1; cf. Axionicus fr. 3 PCG).
The musical orientation of Greek tragedy was not lost on those sixteenth-century Florentine pioneers of opera who conceived of their new cultural project as basically a regeneration of Greek tragedy for a new age (see Blom 1954, 6: 194-200). But the modern era has been more forgetful. One reason for this is the simple loss of virtually all the material that might help us understand tragedy in its fully musical dimension.
But another important factor is the huge influence exerted by the Aristotelian conception of drama on all modern criticism. In his Poetics, Aristotle promulgated a formalist approach to the genre that largely edited out its performative dimension. Action (praxis), plot (muthos), and moral disposition (ethos) were the controlling interests of this approach; the least important of the elements that went to make up tragedy were spectacle ( opsis) and song ( melos). Indeed, song was little more than a sweetener, a kind of pleasing spice to the serious business of action, word, and thought (Poetics, esp. 1449b2-1450b20, but see the Further Reading section for a new and very different interpretation from Sifakis). According to Aristotle, it was not even necessary to see - or to hear - tragedy in order to experience ‘‘the tragic’’ (Poetics, esp. 1450b18-20, 1453b4, 1462a12).
In sharp contrast, many other ancient scholars devoted special studies to the music of tragedy - the greatest musicologist of antiquity, Aristoxenus of Tarentum (born around 370 bce), among them. He wrote works entitled On Tragic Poets, On Tragic Dancing, and On Aulos-Players, but with the total loss of these works, combined with the enormous prestige of Aristotle’s authority, not to mention Plato’s more aggressive and generalized condemnation of the genre, it is little wonder that the music of tragedy has remained a rather abstruse special interest within dramatic studies. As a result of three factors, however - the recent burgeoning of performance studies, the application of this approach to Greek tragedy, and the widespread, indeed global, increase in the restaging and multimedia reworking of ancient tragedy - this situation is rapidly changing.
World History
