Music in Roman Comedy

Description

The plays of Plautus and Terence were profoundly musical: large portions of all the plays were sung to accompaniment, and variations in melody, rhythm and dance were essential elements in bringing both pleasure and meaning to their performance. This book explains the nature of Roman comedy's music: the accompanying tibia, the style of vocal performance, the importance of dance, characteristics of melody, the relationship between meter and rhythm, and the effects of different meters and of variations within individual verses. It provides musical analyses of songs, scenes and whole plays, and draws analogies between Roman comedy's music and the music of modern opera, film and musical theatre. The book will change our understanding of the nature of Roman comedy and will be of interest to students of ancient theatre and Latin literature, scholars and students working on the history of music and theatre, and performers working with ancient plays.

Timothy J. Moore is John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics at Washington University, St Louis. He is author of Artistry and Ideology: Livy's Vocabulary of Virtue (1989), The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience (1998), a translation of Terence's Phormio and numerous articles on Livy, Tibullus, Roman comedy, Petronius, ancient music and Japanese kyogen comedy. He has produced a website in which he sings songs of Plautus in their original rhythms (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~timmoore/Recordings%20of%20Plautus/MoorePlautusRecordings.html). He has lectured widely in North America, Europe and China on topics including music archaeology, Western and Japanese comedy, Greek and Roman music, and analogies between Roman and American musical comedies. He also has extensive experience as a singer and as a performer in musical theatre. He has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Academy in Rome and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University, Massachusetts.

'Awesome in scope and ambition ...' Greek and Roman Musical Studies 'This excellent book is essential for all serious readers of Plautus and Terence, and for anyone interested in ancient music. Scholars of Atic comedy and tragedy will also greatly benefit from its methodologies.' Timothy Power, Phoenix 'This book is well-organized and thorough. Its depth and breadth are remarkable, demonstrating equal comfort with nitty-gritty particularities of Latin elision or hiatus, with comparative evidence and supplementation of textual or evidentiary lacunae. Moore's book enhances its reading of comedy's performance conditions by drawing on Latin oratory and rhetoric, lexicography, Greek musical theory, and Roman historiography, plus a bevy of outside material including Japanese kyogen, Broadway musicals, Western opera, Yugoslavian epic, Javanese gamelan shadow-puppet theater, and folk-music traditions of Greece, Sicily, Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East. This breadth is matched by careful, cautious use of sources.' T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, Bryn Mawr Classical Review