Mesomedes

http://analogioncom/forum/showthreadphp?p=90881&highlight=%EC%E5%F4%E1%E2%EF%E B%DE&langid=1 Mesomedes (b Crete; fl early 2nd century CE) Greek kitharode and lyric poet He was a fre edman and favourite of Emperor Hadrian, who made him his chief musician; he also served under Hadrian¢s successor, Antoninus Pius It was probably Mesomedes whom the emperor Caracalla honoured with a cenotaph a century later and not a later p oet who appropriated a famous name of the past Only 15 of his poems have come down to us, four of them with musical notation; i nformation about the metre and musical settings of two other poems has also been preserved Together they provide insight into the metrics and rhythmics of lyri c poetry during the imperial period; until the discovery of the Epitaph of Seiki los (Pöhlmann, no18) in the late 19th century, the poems with notation were the o nly authentic evidence of late classical vocal music Two poems from the Palatine Anthology (xiv63; xvi323) have been attributed to Mesomedes since antiquity The first, The Sphinx (Heitsch, 1961, no12), employs a special form of the anapestic dimeter ( - - | - -) and its catalectic form, t he paroemiac West (1982, p172), following Aphthonius (H Keil, ed: Grammatici latini, vi, Leipzig, 1874/R, p7523), has described the metre used by Mesomede s as apokroton (¡sonorous¢) The second poem, Glass (Heitsch, 1961, no13), employs trochaic dimeters with and without catalexis In 1581 Vicenzo Galilei, from a manuscript provided by Girolamo Mei, published t hree hymns with Greek musical notation which he attributed to one Dionysius (Pöhlm ann, nos1 5) Quotations from these hymns in secondary sources (Synesius; Ioannes Lydus; the Suda), and the use of the rare apokrota, make an ascription to Mesom edes possible Recent scholarship has arranged these materials into three proöimia (Pöhlmann, no1, To the Muse; no2, To Calliope; no3, To Apollo) and two hymns i n apokrota (Pöhlmann, no4, To Helios; no5, To Nemesis) Where the setting has co me down to us, it is the Lydian tonos that is used To the Muse and To Calliope contain a transition to the chromatic Hypolydian with C To Apollo consists of f our spondaic catalectic dimeters followed by two hexameters, but except for a so litary note mark (C = a) the setting has been lost To Helios is preceded by a m etric and rhythmic skolion, which makes no sense in this context, since it descr ibes choriambic dimeters in twelve-time; a poem by Mesomedes in this verse metre has therefore been lost To Helios and To Nemesis employ apokrota In so far as they are catalectic, the omitted short element is usually replaced by a lengthe ning sign; in two cases (To Helios, lines 23 and 25) there is a three-note melis ma at the catalexis Line 25 repeats the melody of line 23 exactly, so that the hymn ends with a kind of refrain All the poems with musical notation show imita tion of the verbal accentuation in the melody, a feature that first appears in t he Delphic hymns of 128 bce (Pöhlmann, nos19 20) In 1903 Horna discovered eight po ems without notation (Heitsch, 1961, nos4 11) in a 13th-century manuscript (I-Rva t Ottobgr59; reproduced in Merkelbach and van Thiel, 25 8) after Ariphron¢s hymn t o Hygieia (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 494 5) dating from the 4th century bce These poems have been ascribed to Mesomedes on stylistic and metrical grounds Characteristic of Mesomedes are the arbitrary nature of his subject matter, evid ent even from the titles of the poems, his wish to vocalize his poems in the Dor ian dialect (except for Pöhlmann, no1), his preference for apokrota, and his conf ining himself to stichic lyric poetry In the settings it is noticeable that he restricts himself to diatonics and the Lydian or Hypolydian tonoi The rhythmica l and musical skolia in two of the three sources suggest that a collection of Me somedes¢ works with all the poems set to music existed in later classical times A comparison of the style and metre of Mesomedes and Synesius shows the former¢s si gnificance for the late literary hymn (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 606) Synesius p refigured the first evidence of Greek Christian community singing (Pöhlmann, no34 and p108) Bibliography V Galilei: Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Florence, 1581/R) JF Bellermann: Die Hymnen des Dionysios und Mesomedes (Berlin, 1840) C von Jan, ed: Musici scriptores graeci (Leipzig, 1895 9/R), 454ff; suppl, 40ff U von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: Griechische Verskunst (Berlin, 1921/R), 494 5, 595 6 07 JU Powell, ed: Collectanea alexandrina (Oxford, 1925/R), 197 8 K Horna: Die Hymnen des Mesomedes (Vienna and Leipzig, 1928), 3 45 G Martellotti: Mesomede (Rome, 1929) W Vetter: ¡Mesomedes¢, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft , xv/1 (Stuttgart, 1931), 1103 RP Winnington-Ingram: Mode in Ancient Greek Music (Cambridge, 1936/R), 41ff E Wellesz: A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (Oxford, 1949, enlarged 2/1961), 152ff I Henderson: ¡Ancient Greek Music¢, NOHM, i (1957), 336 403, esp 371 E Heitsch: ¡Die Mesomedes-Überlieferung¢, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse, iii (1959), 35 45 E Heitsch: Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit, i (Göttingen , 1961, 2/1963), 24ff R Merkelbach and H van Thiel, eds: Griechisches Leseheft zur Einführung in Paläog raphie und Textkritik (Göttingen, 1965), 25 8 E Pöhlmann, ed: Denkmäler altgriechischer Musik (Nuremberg, 1970) ML West: Greek Metre (Oxford, 1982), 165, 167 n11, 170, 172 3 ML West: Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), 209, 302 8 Egert Pöhlmann Grove