Music Tragedies
Myth and music are the principal roots of drama. Myths always played an important role in human societies. They created a process of communication between people, in which some individuals shared with others their understanding of the world. That was achieved by offering a representation of the world and by giving it a plot, so that it would be interesting and familiar to the audience and not just a dry lesson. Music could play a similar role, communicating situations and emotions by sounds and harmony. In the western tradition, the first "tragedies" were myths which were danced and sung by a "chorus" at festivals in honour of Dionysus (God of Wine), in ancient Greece. The earliest presentations probably consisted of a chorus of men dancing in a ring, reciting or chanting some Greek myth while individual performers would stand on a rough wooden platform or cart. Spectators were seated on a hillside to view these early "plays". In the open-air, day-lit Greek theatre, the chorus was a practical necessity. It made the transitions between scenes, giving actors the chance to enter and leave the playing area, and even announced what characters those actors portrayed. But the function of the chorus goes beyond this. The choral odes, acco
It was in 534 B.C. that perhaps the most important stage in the creation of drama was reached with Thespis, who invented an actor who conversed with the leader of the chorus, and by his reports of events occurring off the stage could provide the chorus with materials for fresh songs in new scenes. Through the addition of a second actor (by Aeschylus) and a third (by Sophocles), the representation was made possible of a drama which could show and develop a human situation in all its aspects. Now it should be made clear that from this point on we are talking about the evolution of tragedy and tragic theatre in Athens, and that this evolution was connected and depended on the evolution of democracy in that city. This new political independence meant that any free male citizen of Athens could achieve being one of the rulers of the city and having the fate of his community in his hands. The need to understand and to be taught how to deal with power was obvious for the men of the city, and it was in this climate that Greek tragedy emerged. With the coming of the Renaissance, the visual arts more and more came to represent the afflictive aspects of life, and the word tragedy again came into currency. Chaucer (1340-1400) used the word in Troilus and Criseyde, and in The Canterbury Tales it is applied to a series of stories in the medieval style of de casibus virorum illustrium, meaning "the downfalls" (more or less inevitable) "of princes." Chaucer used the word to signify little more than the turn of the wheel of fortune, against whose force no meaningful effort of man is possible.This reminds us of how Aristoteles defined tragedy, as a drama which concerns better than average people (heroes, kings, gods) who suffer a transition from good fortune to bad fortune, and who speak in an elevated language. With the possibility of dialogue between the actor and the chorus, more complex themes and modes of storytelling could be developed. The earliest surviving texts of plays are seven tragedies by Aeschylus dating from the first half of the 5th century BC. Adding a se
Some topics in this essay:
God Wine,
BC Adding,
Oedipus Rex,
Canterbury Tales,
,
Jesus Christ,
Tragedy Aristotelian,
Church Churchmen,
greek tragedy,
characters themselves,
tragic situation,
power grandeur,
tragedy tragic,
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Approximate Word count = 1396
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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