Music in Roman Comedy by Timothy J. Moore

182 PHOENIX meticulous analysis of the contents of well J 2:4, to open lines of inquiry, raise important questions, and provoke thought and debate. She also intends to make available to other scholars a body of evidence of which many further significant questions might be asked (to which end she provides a detailed catalogue and many useful tables and charts, as well as high-quality illustrations and three appendices, one contributed by Mark Lawall and another by Lisa Little). She has succeeded admirably. McMaster University Sean Corner Music in Roman Comedy. By Timothy J. Moore. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. xvi, 452. “Like the music of opera, musicals, and film,” observes Timothy Moore in Music in Roman Comedy, “music gave Roman comedies form, played a significant role in making the plays enjoyable, and contributed to their meaning” (376). But any study of music in Roman comedy faces a glaring obstacle: the melodies of the Plautine and Terentian stage are now lost. They may not even have been notated at all, but simply worked out in rehearsal between the tibicen, who composed them and accompanied them on his double pipes, and the actors who sang them. (The view that comic music was largely improvised is one Moore convincingly refutes [6–7, 137–138].) How then can we appreciate the contributions of music to a given comedy without having the music itself? This book shows the way through two complementary approaches. First, Moore reviews the ancient evidence for the music of the palliata to present a detailed description of the sonic characteristics and performance conventions of its two interactive components , the tibiae and the actor’s voice. This is no mean feat. Evidence is problematic for even the most basic facts of musical performance in Roman comedy (such as whether it was actors themselves or, as Livy 7.2.8–11 seems to indicate, surrogate cantores who sang the cantica), but Moore’s assessments consistently find just the right note. Comparative material from the music of Sardinia, Japan, Java, and elsewhere is rewardingly applied. Secondly, Moore reads the meters of Roman comedy—Plautus’ numeri innumeri, Terence’s restrained iambo-trochaic palette—as the blueprint from which the performers built out elements of the musical design. Metrical analysis permits only the reconstruction of rhythm, but rhythm and melody were so closely connected in Roman music—the same term, modus, may describe one or the other, or their interplay—that understanding rhythms in their dramatic context allows us to imagine fairly the kind of melodic delivery that accompanied them. Moore persuasively suggests that when a rhythm recurs at key dramatic moments in a comedy, a cognate melody would have been repeated as well, the combination forming a leitmotif (172). More fundamentally, by correlating metrical/rhythmic sequences across the Plautine and Terentian corpora, Moore aims to comprehend the semiotics of music in the palliata, its patterns of syntax and signification. Metrical transitions indicate musical changes— starts, stops, intensification, and variation—which can be pegged to typical situations and tend to follow predictable cycles. Certain meters recur in association with certain character and scene types, and the musical tropes built on them presumably shared their connotations. Moore explores how poets worked within and against these generic patterns in their individual comedies, using music (as suggested by the meter) for dramatic effect in ways BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 183 that both satisfied and frustrated audience expectations. He is especially alert to the art of musical misdirection, as in his discussion of “false starts,” moments when characters begin to sing trochaic septenarii, the meter typically deployed to advance plot (172–174), but then quickly switch back to other meters—plot business teasingly deferred. The sudden disappointment of the expectations aroused by the trochaics creates a “frisson” that is both humorous and draws attention to key words and plot points (251). Music in Roman Comedy comprises an Introduction, Conclusion, ten chapters, and five appendices. The Introduction evaluates the primary ancient sources for comic music (Cicero is valuable, Donatus and Diomedes less so). Moore addresses the vexed question of instrumental interludes, overtures, and postludes (17–22). The latter two, he concludes, were rare; interludes performed...

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