Ancient Greek Metrics and Music: Is It Time for a New Dialogue?

Abstract

This paper contains a survey of studies that demonstrate a new sensitivity, established over time, towards the performative dimension of ancient Greek poetic texts. Focus on the public and on the idea of consumption less as reading and more as a ‘show’ first emerged in the 1980s if not earlier, and at the same time more in-depth research on music has had a great impact on metrical studies, giving metricists a new opportunity to distance themselves from a purely verbal approach to the versified text and to turn profitably to the semantic and dramaturgical aspects implicit in the ‘scores’ of meters and rhythms.