Sound and Fury, together signifying more

 Terracotta amphora with kithara player,
attributed to the Berlin Painter, c490 B.C.

"What is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious - these things can be sung and only be sung."
- Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

I just had the enjoyable experience of watching a short video on the recreation of Greek music where in it they discuss not only some of the technical details, but more broadly brought home the point that Greek poetry was meant to be sung, often to music.  Now I knew this fact before the video, but I realize now it had not quite percolated into my mind in its full implications.

As I have been reading Homer I am at times suddenly... annoyed by how he seems to melodramatically dawdle in his lines.  I do not mean merely the repetition of epithets, which has its own metric basis, nor in a difference of modern expectation, where we have much less the patience of his original audience.  Instead it just seemed as though he were tossing out impromptu speeches, turns of phrase that seemed just a bit of out place and sought to soar higher than I felt warranted.  It was like people breaking spontaneously into song in a musical, something I admit I never had much sympathy for either.

But on reaching the part at 13:15 where the choir begins to sing a portion of Euripides' Orestes, it just clicked.  There is a quote I scavenged from MacIntyre's After Virtue that describes it well:

"The relationship of our beliefs to sentences that we only or primarily sing, let alone to the music which accompanies those sentences, is not at all the same as the relationship of our beliefs to the sentences that we primarily say and say in an assertive mode."

Singing Orestes' lament as he was fleeing from the Furies made all the difference.  Had I read those lines I might have been somewhat impressed by the imagery, but in the context of the music one can hear the running.  The frightening pursuit, the way the lament is dashed off, as one would bemoaning internally, had the proper power.

But I don't want to give the impression that's the full of it.  There's something else, both in that quote and in the experience, that was over and above the contents of the sentence.  I'm not quite sure what it is, but reflecting backward I can suddenly see how this element of Homer makes such sense now, that one should be walking, pacing, bending up and down and gesticulating in some of these scenes as they are narrate, and I realize why I took such delight in saying the first lines of the Iliad out loud. 

---

p.s. Is it not remarkable that we can reconstruct these things? A few marks on a page, a sketch on a vase, and back it comes to life - Attic Park, featuring extinct sounds rather than dinosaurs.  Although perhaps that metaphor is better reserved to a (rather humorous) reconstruction I once saw of Neanderthal vocal qualities.  Nonetheless, information is everywhere - we just need to know how to read it (TASFAD on the Morrison Formation).