PHRYGIAN MUSIC IN TROJAN WOMEN: Legitimizing Cultural
Appropriation
The first stasimon of the Trojan
Women is a dramatization of the birth of epic poetry, and a staging of the
appropriation of Phrygian music by the Greek tradition. Greek texts show an
ambivalent mixture of disparaging and admiring attitudes towards Phrygia, Lydia,
and Thrace. This has important consequences for interpreting texts or myths
that are set in those regions. The issue of Phrygian song is crucial in the Trojan
Women.
In the Trojan Women, Trojan
characters link the disruption of Phrygian traditions of song and dance
performance to the arrival of the Greeks and their music, which causes the
violent end of their civilization. The chorus
of Trojan women frames the
narration as a piece of ‘Greek’ epic poetry
that substitutes the Phrygian tradition. Trojan characters in the drama express
the awareness of the end of Phrygian music and of the emergence of Greek
poetry. This self-effacing move of the chorus can be seen to legitimize the
Greek appropriation of Trojan subject matter.
8 Phrygian songs (Frugia melea) are
mentioned in the Trojan Women (545) as a thing of the past. In the past there
were occasions for public performance: this tradition is now interrupted. This
is a major theme in the play; characters and the chorus make often references
to it. The text mentions songs for the gods and pannychides, nightlong
festivals with song and dance (Tro. 1071-73). The songs of Troy were part of a
regular, well-organized civic life, and were well structured; in the play, we
find a series of distorted fragments of this tradition. According to Damon, the
most influential fifth century musical theorist, “styles of music are nowhere
altered without change in the greatest laws of the city”(Plato, Rep. 424 c).S
The Trojan Women represents the converse of this statement: that a breakdown of
society cannot but entail a breakdown in musical tradition. In the play, ritual
patterns of song performance are constantly re-staged and disrupted. Wedding
songs and ritual lament (threnoi) are conspicuously distorted. The
most notable instance is Cassandra’s
wedding song.
The first
stasimon of the Trojan Women is explicitly presented as the first occasion the
women have for singing after the interruption during the fall of Troy. Note
that the parodos is not presented as a song: it is a dialogue with Hecuba, the meter
used is lyric anapaests, the most regular lyric meter, and remarkably similar
to recited anapaests. More importantly, the chorus members do not present their
lines in the parodos as a song: as characters in the play they sing, but they
are not aware that they are singing, and make no reference to that. The first
stasimon is the first song of the Trojan Women after the fall of Troy. It
begins where they were forced to stop. It takes over from the interrupted song
of the Trojans that is narrated within the stasimon itself. But in the meantime,
the Trojan voice has changed. It has acquired a Greek tone. The last song of
the chorus in Troy was distinctively Phrygian. But the voice that takes up the
interrupted song of the Trojans is distinctively Greek.
When the Trojan prisoners start
narrating the end of Phrygian music, they allude to a Greek tradition that post-dates
the ‘actual’ date of the events. A
‘new’ poetry, a new mousike is given birth from the
destruction of the Trojan city with its interrupted music. We do not know
whether the Phrygian harmonia was used at the beginning of the stasimon. If it
was, Euripides was offering a characteristic example of cultural colonization:
the Homeric phrases made the exotic, conquered tune into a Greek one.
If the Trojan culture is
annihilated, and the Trojans themselves recognize that the fame of their city
will disappear, then Greek tragedy can step in. This explains the very obvious
pro-Trojan stance of the tragedy. The Phrygians of the 5th century were seen as
ignorant slaves, and therefore cannot be proper heirs to that tradition. If
Phrygian music and Phrygian instruments are to survive at all, it will be in
Greek culture; they will be played in Athenian tragedies. Greek tragedy has the
strength to incorporate elements from the Phrygian musical and ritual
tradition, or at least elements that passed for Phrygian to the eyes and ears
of the audience. Tragedy puts on stage the violent end of a civilization, the
birth of a new subject matter for Greek song, and the acquisition of an Eastern
musical heritage. By adopting a Trojan point of view, tragedy can speak up for
the defeated. This is the most authoritative way to achieve the ultimate
appropriation of the Phrygian tradition: to speak up for the vanished
barbarians of the past.
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