Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece by Tom Phillips Armand D'Angour

402 PHOENIX Trojan Women (100–139) presents a situation where choreia is “a symbol of the civic strength and stability that has now been destroyed” (101). The play stresses the absence of choreia following the destruction of Troy, in a performed paradox where the singing chorus lament the music they have lost, and Cassandra must sing a hymenaios for herself without a chorus (113–116). Musical innovation and features of New Music stress novelty in a postchoral existence, leading to antiphonal lament. For Weiss, this slows the action of the play, halting the plot’s forward momentum, just as in Electra music was used to drive the audience towards the matricide. Helen (140–190) instead binds its title character to the chorus, as its chorēgos (141; though there is some slippage between this function as chorus trainer and producer and that of the koryphaios, the chorus leader, as a fellow performer with the chorus). Weiss offers an insightful reading of choral song as a choral identity unfolds for Helen over the course of the play. The female voice emerges from that of the monstrous Sirens (145–156) and the natural (and mythic) nightingale (158–167) and develops towards Spartan choreia. This discussion prompted me to wonder to what extent choral dance in Athens would be characterized by the Athenian male performers as specifically Spartan during the Peloponnesian War. The opposite trajectory emerges in the discussion of Iphigenia in Aulis (191–231), as the parodos starts with panhellenic choreia but concludes on Iphigenia herself, as a single performer (231). The wedding in the plot leads to a song with characteristics of the hymenaios (211–224), but as with Cassandra in Trojan Women, the marriage anticipated is not realized. As in the previous plays examined, what seems important in these choral songs is a sense of “doubleness, the mix of alterity and proximity” (242). The mousikē these choruses isolate provide a richer dramatic world, because the songs all point to a larger musical reality. As a brief discussion in the conclusion to the book notes, this is not the case in Bacchae (241–246), where Dionysiac choral performance points directly to Dionysiac choral performance both on- and off-stage. This discussion represents an important coda to the larger study, because it rightly notes that the approach is not some master key for interpreting tragedy (or even just later Euripides). The value of Weiss’s readings emerges from the unique circumstances of musical presentation in each play. There is so much to like in this book, and a brief review cannot summarize it adequately . Weiss explores the appropriation of musical genres such as dithyramb into tragic song (9–10, 76–87), and the juxtaposition of aulos music with other musical instruments, such as the syrinx (205–210). Weiss regularly points to fragmentary plays to enrich her analysis, and arguments are clearly signposted throughout. The Music of Tragedy illuminates the musical imagery in four Euripidean plays and it should provoke new readings of choral song in tragedy. University of British Columbia C. W. Marshall Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece. Edited by Tom Phillips and Armand D'Angour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. Pp. 294, 6 blackand -white figures. The relationship between ancient Greek music and poetry has been attracting growing interest in recent scholarship. Besides the enduring fortune of disciplines like metrics, which has always exercised a great power of seduction over philologists, several other BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 403 aspects of ancient mousikē—virtually ignored until a few years ago—have recently been taken into consideration (e.g., scalar systems, instrumental practices, and so on). This has led many scholars in the field of classics to approach ancient “literary” texts with more awareness of their performative components. This volume, whose contributions originated in two events—a workshop and a conference —held in Oxford between 2013 and 2014, explores the different possible ways of dealing with such a fascinating, yet tricky, topic. The ten chapters here collected, jointly edited by Tom Phillips and Armand D’Angour, analyse a wide range of texts (in terms of chronology and genre) from different perspectives, demonstrating the liveliness of modern debates on these topics. Taken...

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