Agocs, PA; (2016) Preface to Pindar: Early Classical Choral Songs and the Language of Genre. [Digital scholarly resource]. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:AgocsP.Pre...

Text Preface to Pindar-- CHS piece for Lanah.pdf - Published Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff Download (290kB)

Abstract

This paper aims to compare two historically distinct ways of conceiving the genres of early Greek choral song, and what they tell us about how their meaning and function changed across time. The first part examines how the concepts and terms by which Alexandrian scholarship approached and categorised early classical choral songs can both illuminate their meaning (particularly in a Hellenistic cultural context) and also distort our impressions of their cultural function ('songwork') in the 5th-century song culture that created them. The second part, drawing on surviving song-texts, presents several examples of how early classical poets use the 'language of genre' that they inherited from their tradition to define what they and their choruses are doing, and to enable the song-text to endure in multiple contexts of re-performance. The emphasis here is on the breadth of allusion (to places, performance-modes, popular song, music and dance, and so on as well as to earlier texts and traditions of song) and the role such allusion plays in the poetics (or 'ethnopoetics') of these texts. A close reading of the odes of Pindar and Bacchylides enables us better to comprehend how the 'implied poetics' of song worked within its own, early classical milieu, understanding both song's place in its own indigenous life-world, and the nature of genres as enabling matrices of poetic creativity and invented tradition within that culture.

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