This slim volume published in French comprises four impressive chapters by specialists in ancient Greek music and dance. E. Pöhlmann, whose work on the few dozen surviving notated musical fragments has been invaluable to students and scholars for decades (notably in his collaboration with the late M.L. West on the authoritative 2001 publication Documents of Ancient Greek Music, abbreviated DAGM), gives a brief outline of scholarly investigations into ancient Greek music from their beginnings in the Renaissance to modern times. S. Perrot offers a fresh examination, with transcription and colour photograph, of a papyrus of unknown provenance, now in Yale, with musical notation (DAGM 134–7) that came to light in 1996, with a stimulating if inevitably inconclusive discussion of what can be surmised about the transmission and purpose of such papyri. M.-H. Delavaud-Roux asks whether ancient musical papyri were created with dance in mind, focusing on papyri containing portions of tragic texts. Finally, M. Kaisin discusses fourteen papyri from Oxyrhynchus that provide a range of evidence for the presence, repertoire and activities of actor-singers in Graeco-Roman Egypt in the first few centuries ce.
Much of the value of the book lies in the description and close analysis of the papyri, including some that have come to light since the publication of DAGM. While the purpose of notated musical documents on papyrus remains hard to establish, they will have had a more practical aim than the handsome musical inscriptions on stone that have contributed significant epigraphic data for understanding and realising the sounds of ancient Greek music. Pöhlmann helpfully extends his survey beyond the papyrological focus of the book's title to introduce the latter (with accompanying photographs): that is, the inscription of the Delphic paeans of Athenaeus and Limenius from the late second century bce and the marble column on which is inscribed the ‘Song of Seikilos’ from the second century ce, here rightly (though without discussion) described as a skolion or drinking-song rather than an ‘epitaph’, as it is often designated. As an annexe to the chapter Pöhlmann prints the text of the latest-dated notated papyrus from antiquity, that of a Christian Hymn to the Trinity, in the full, metrically adept restoration proposed by himself and West, whose reading of [ο]ὐ τὰν ἠῶ (‘not at dawn’) for the first visible letters of the fragment replaced Hunt's unmetrical conjecture of πρ]υτανείωι.
Pöhlmann inserts a section on the relationship of Greek melody to pitch accentuation, a conformity rigorously demonstrated, as he notes, in the longest surviving texts, the Delphic paeans, and found in the majority of other musical documents. More contentious is the bald statement that ‘les mélodies de la lyrique chorale dorienne strophique ne respectent aucunement la prosodie des textes respectifs de la strophe et de l'antistrophe’ (p. 15). It is likely that an observable tendency to pitch-accent conformity in the Euripides’ Orestes papyrus (DAGM 3, presenting a melodisation of the text that arguably goes back to Euripides) is not accidental; the kind of pitch-accent conformity of melodies to which traditional Mandarin Chinese texts are sung, broadly but not always strictly conforming to the tonal shape of words, offers an instructive parallel. It might also be noted that the standard, but not readily explicable, dialectal designation ‘Dorian’ to account for the long alphas in choral lyric may well be a misunderstanding of the preference for the use of low vowels in song (i.e. [α:] rather than [ε:]), which offer a more stable basis for the enunciation of vocal pitch.
Consideration of how elements of dance might be indicated by the papyri is yet more elusive. Delavaud-Roux presents the evidence to show that, if women's roles were sung at a higher pitch than those of men, it might be possible to extract indications of performance by identifying the modes (scale systems) in which melodies were composed. However, a quoted statement concerning ‘l'impossibilité de chanter et de danser tout à la fois’ (p. 52) risks leading to a misconception about the nature of dance movement in, for instance, fifth-century Attic tragedy. The few images that survive of theatrical dance show performers (exclusively men) in robes of a length and style that would have made vigorous leg movements unlikely; and the evidence that hand gestures (cheironomia) were used by dramatic choruses offers a different conception of the kind of dance (widely attested in other traditions such as in Indian classical dance) that creates no difficulty for singers to accompany movement with voice.
In the discussion of the Orestes papyrus Delavaud-Roux correctly observes that the dancing accompanying the words ‘ne pouvait pas supporter de mouvements trop importants ou trop brusques’ (p. 66). However, she overlooks the clearest indication of the nature of such possible movements: the diacritical marks called stigmai that indicate arsis, the ‘rise’ (e.g. of feet, arms or upper body) on a particular syllable or set of syllables so marked. Strikingly, there are two stigmai marked at regular points along the irregular metrical structure of the dochmiacs of the Orestes chorus, suggesting that the vigorously offbeat rhythms of that metrical system were not replicated by the dancer's bodily actions. It is customary to lament that publications in English too often ignore the contributions of continental scholars; in the case of this volume, the bibliography shows a neglect of recent anglophone scholarship on ancient music, attention to which might have helped obviate some of the less satisfying elements of this accomplished set of essays.
