The importance of music for epinician, as for all other types of choral performance in Archaic and Classical Greece, has long been recognized, but the exiguousness of the evidence for the compositional principles behind such music, and for what these poems actually sounded like in performance, has limited scholarly enquiries. Examination of Pindar's texts themselves for evidence of his musical practices was for a long time dominated by extensive and often inconclusive debate about the relations between metres and modes. More (...) recently scholars have begun to explore Pindar's relations to contemporary developments in musical performance, and in doing so have opened up new questions about how music affected audiences as aesthetically and culturally significant in its own right, and how it interacted with the language of the text. This article will investigate the performance scenarios of two of Pindar's epinicians, arguing that in each case the poems contain indications of specific musical accompaniments, and use these scenarios as a starting point for engaging with wider interpretative questions. The self-referential dimension of these compositions will be of particular importance; I shall argue that Pindar deployed a type of musical intertextuality, in which his compositions draw on pre-existing melodic structures, utilizing their cultural associations for the purposes of his own pieces, a process crucial to the dynamics of performance of the poems concerned. By doing so I shall attempt to reach a better understanding of the roles played by music in epinician performance and of Pindar's place in relation to the musical culture in which he worked. (shrink)

Much has been written on the genesis of the pseudo-hesiodic Shield of Heracles — so much, that true progress is difficult to discern among the welter of theories. But some has been made, although the conclusions that have been reached must be regarded as likely hypotheses rather than proven facts. In this article I propose to proceed from some of these conclusions, ensuring that they are as firmly grounded as possible, to an assessment of how this poem's version of the (...) combat of Heracles and Cycnus relates to the likely circumstances and occasion of its original performance. This will involve considering the legend's variants , and a new look at the first half of the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo. (shrink)

This article inquires into the shaping force that competition at musical contests exercised on ancient perceptions of literary genres, particularly for the non-choral and non-dramatic kinds of the Classical Period. Three musical contests of the fourth century BCE, the Panathenaia, the Amphiaraia, and the Artemisia, are taken as case studies. After a reconstruction of their programs, principles of categorization that spectators might have inferred from the contests are deduced, and modes in which categories of competition and literary genres interacted are (...) put forward. The article concludes by suggesting that, by enacting taxonomies, either strengthening or weakening the specificity of traditional types, institutionalized poetic and musical competitions contributed to the ancient conceptualization of literary genres. (shrink)