"an approach to the technique the Homeric singers used"

October 22, 2016 3:31 PM

Homeric Singing - An Approach to the Original Performance is the website of Professors Georg Danek and Stefan Hagel. There they have a five minutes of their educated best guess of how ancient Greek bards would have sounded like, singing the epics of Homer accompanying themselves on a phorminx. [via Open Culture]
posted by Kattullus (11 comments total)

When will the Dance Mix be released?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:03 PM on October 22, 2016

More seriously, I love the idea that we can make an educated guess about ephemeral things millennia ago. Makes me want some sea-dark wine, it does.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:04 PM on October 22, 2016 [5 favorites]

Rickroll? You bastard.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:08 PM on October 22, 2016

This is cool, the music sounds good, thanks Kattallus!
posted by carter at 4:48 PM on October 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hmm. Given the bardic/Homeric defense on the part of the Nobel Literature prize spokespeople regarding their latest nominee, I'd have to say this helps their case. Dylan has improved the singing of poetry by an order of magnitude or two.
posted by kozad at 6:35 PM on October 22, 2016

This is amazing! And the sound is so soothing.

So it sounds like they're just extracting a melody from the ancient pitch accent?

These results give rise to a technique of Homeric performance which can be acquired. The performer has to accommodate the accentual rises and falls of the individual words of each verse to the melodic contour which results from syntactical and metrical features. With some training, anyone who is able to read Homer can learn to improvise the melody to any given Homeric text.

I wish I'd known about this back when I was a young classics student studying Homer! It would have been awesome to be able to bust out a melodic rendition of the hexameters just from looking at the accents.

I wish they'd included the Greek text of Demodokos's Song on the page there so you could read along and see how the recording matched up with the accents on the page.
posted by edheil at 11:27 PM on October 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

tnaft - to my ear this is much better than Dylan
posted by idiopath at 1:42 AM on October 23, 2016

This is so great in every way.

The music! The reasoning!

Since it hinges on pitch accents, I wonder if the same technique could be used for singing hexameter verse in Swedish or Norwegian, or Serbian for that matter?
posted by AxelT at 7:27 AM on October 23, 2016

> So it sounds like they're just extracting a melody from the ancient pitch accent?

If so, that's a bad idea. I mean, it's nice if it produces a pleasing melody, but that's not how music works for languages with pitch accents. If I'm remembering correctly, typically a prominent word will often be fitted to the melody in a way that works with its inherent pitch contour, but mostly it's irrelevant. Part of the pleasure of music, or any art form, is in the subtle contrasts between the nature of the medium and the formal use made of it; compare the varying stresses in English iambic pentameter—it's deadly dull if every line is da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA da-DA.
posted by languagehat at 7:45 AM on October 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

But when do they get first level spells?
posted by stevis23 at 8:05 AM on October 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

As an academic in another field, I'm a bit alarmed by their citations: of the seven listed, five works are by the current collaborators (Danek and Hagel)

My supervisor would eat me alive if I did anything with that kind of bibliography...
posted by prismatic7 at 12:06 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]