The oral Epic: Performance and Music

There is plenty of evidence that both in ancient Greece and in medieval Europe orally performed epics were sung rather than spoken, often to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. Although scholars studying epics such as the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Chanson de Roland have commented on this fact, little progress has been made in incorporating the musical and more generally the performative aspect of oral epic into their interpretations. This is partly explained by the scarcity of musical documents that have come down to us. There is, however, a wealth of comparative material from living traditions and the implications of their study for traditional medieval epics (and possibly also the Homeric poems) form the subject of this book.

This book is the first representative survey of the music and performance of oral epic poetry world-wide. It contains a general introduction on the music and performance of oral epics by Karl Reichl (University of Bonn).

Contents:
1. Preface
2. Karl Reichl: Introduction: The Music and Performance of Oral Epics
3. Gregory Nagy: Epic as Music: Rhapsodic Models of Homer in Plato's Timaeus and Critias
4. Stephen Erdely: Music of South Slavic Epics
5. Wolf Dietrich: The Singing of Albanian Heroic Poetry
6. Margaret H. Beissinger: Creativity in Performance: Words and Music in Balkan and Old French Epic
7. Dzhamilya Kurbanova: The Singing Traditions of Turkmen epic Poetry
8. Karl Reichl: The Performance of the Karakalpak Zhyrau
9. Emine Gürsoy-Naskali: Dudak degmez: A Form of Poetry Competition among the Asiks of Anatolia
10. Hiromi Lorraine Sakata: The Musical Curtain: Music as a Structural Marker in Epic Performance
11. Carole Pegg: The Power of Performance: West Mongolian Heroic Epics
12. Nicole Revel: Singing Epics among the Palawan Highlanders (Philippines): Musical and Vocal Styles
13. Christiane Seydou: Word and Msuic: The Epic Genre of the Fulbe of Massina (Mali)
14. Joseph Harris: The Performance of Old Norse Eddic Poetry: A Retrospective
15. John Stevens: Reflections on the Music of Medieval Narrative Poetry