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Rhapsodic Apprenticeship Final Draft.Pdf (374.1Kb) Green 1 Caroline Green Dr. Rabinowitz UGS 302 12/14/17 Rhapsodic Apprenticeship When discussing the epic poetry of ancient Greece, it is widely accepted that the Iliad, along with the other works of Homer and his contemporaries, was sung. The singers—rhapsodes or, alternatively, Homeridae—can be found in ancient texts from Plato to Herodotus, singing these epics by memory. The question of how they learned their craft, however, is not one that can be answered through analysis of ancient texts simply because it is never addressed there. Evidence of the existence and role of the Homeridae and rhapsodes is scarce, and that of apprenticeship within these groups is virtually nonexistent. However, a comparison between the ancient bards and those of more modern cultures provides at least a basis for what rhapsodic apprenticeship may have been like. The rhapsodes were, simply put, the singers of Ancient Greece. The first known use of the term occurs in Herodotus’s The Histories, when Clisthenes “stopped the rhapsodists’ competitions in reciting from Homer’s poems in Sicyon” (5.67), implying that the term had been accepted into the Greek lexicon before the 5th Century B.C. Most knowledge on who and what the rhapsodes were comes from Plato’s Ion, in which Socrates’s character remarks: I often envy the profession of a rhapsode, Ion; for you have always to wear fine clothes, and to look as beautiful as you can is a part of your art. Then, again, you are obliged to be continually in the company of many good poets; and especially of Homer, who is the best and most divine of them; and to understand him, and not merely learn his words by Green 2 rote, is a thing greatly to be envied. And no man can be a rhapsode who does not understand the meaning of the poet. For the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers, but how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means? All this is greatly to be envied. (Plato) The rhapsodes recited the works of the great poets, such as Homer and, as mentioned later in the scene, Hesiod and Archilochus, and they competed with one another in this profession at Panhellenic contests, such as the Olympic or Pythian games. The rhapsodes were preceded by a different form of singer—the aoidos. It is widely believed that this pre-literate poet “does not recite well-known songs because songs do not exist at all during the period of the authentic epic. He never sings other people’s poetry; he always composes himself” (Radloff 86). In the Odyssey, however, the blind poet Demodocus performs well-known stories, such as the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. It cannot be assumed, therefore, that every aoidos composed each piece himself; perhaps, instead, they performed well- known stories with their own improvisations. Many scholars, such as Radloff, argue that with the development of writing, the aoidoi gave way to rhapsodes, who simply recited previously composed work rather than improvising their own, though, at least for the archaic period, there is no ancient text to support that assumption. Etymologically, the term “rhapsode” is understood as “a concrete metaphor for the process of composition, describing the operation by which the strands or web of discourse are woven together” (Gentili 7), implying that improvised composition and creation, “putting together the material of the story and the subsequent weaving of the plot” (Gentili 7), may well Green 3 have been continued by rhapsodes. Thus, it follows that the term may not have referred strictly to the performance of previously composed works: “the rhapsode Cynathos of Chios, who between 504 and 501 had recited Homer ‘for the first time’ in Syracuse, was not only the performer but also the author of many epic verses that he is said to have interpolated into the corpus of the Homeric poems” (Gentili 7). It may therefore be inferred that rhapsodes were not necessarily limited to mere repetition, but may have sometimes practiced composition as well. There was, however, a subset of the rhapsodes generally known to have “no longer composed in the same manner as did the early singers since there was an Homeric ‘text’ to be preserved”—the Homeridae (Lee, 36). Very little ancient evidence can be found to support anything besides the existence of this elusive group, but their existence is undeniable; the earliest known appearance of the word is in Pindar’s Nemean Ode II. For Timodemos of Athens, Winner in the Pankration. “As the sons of Homer, singers of stitched lays, begin for the most part from a preface to Zeus, so my client has won his first victory in the grove of Nemean Zeus” (Pindar Nem. II). The Homeridae (the “sons of Homer”) are equated to rhapsodes (“singers of stitched lays”), so the conclusion can be drawn that the Homeridae were some form of rhapsode. The term appears next in Plato’s Republic, this time as “the Homerids” (10.598), and again in Phaedrus, as “Homeric experts [who] cite two verses from the less well-known poems” (252 B). Insight gained from these references beyond what was already interpreted from Pindar is minimal, but another reference—in Plato’s Ion—provides a little more detail. Ion, the rhapsode the aforementioned character of Socrates was speaking about, remarks that “the Homeridae should give [him] a golden crown” for how well he recites Homer (Plato). Presumably, therefore, not all rhapsodes were Homeridae; rather, a very specific group made up these Sons of Homer, who dedicated themselves to the work of that great poet. Green 4 To this quite limited extent, the existence and role of rhapsodes and Homeridae are known to us today. What is not found in the ancient record, however, is evidence on the training or apprenticeship of these bards. The mysteries of how they trained, when they began, for how long they studied, and what that process entailed—whether they studied the written word of Homer or, more likely, they learned to improvise within a common framework—will likely never be answered with certainty, but the clues found by comparing rhapsodes to the oral poets of more modern cultures can help to unravel this mystery at least to a limited extent and permit extrapolation of a likely theory. The Tamil culture, to begin with, places great importance on the recitation of epic poetry, though there is no term for the epic genre because “most Tamil folk stories or legends are musical compositions longer than the average English ballad” (Beck 3). In other words, nearly every folk story is an epic poem, so it is not separated from the general headings of story songs and song stories. The specific ballad studied by Beck in Tamilnadu is the Brothers story, an Indian epic following “a set of heroic male twins . usually recited in temples or at festival gatherings” (Beck 19). The Brothers story continues to be told by professional ballad singers throughout the countryside while simultaneously existing in various printed forms. This is strikingly similar to the wandering rhapsodes of ancient Greece, performing works such as the Iliad while the written form is taking hold. Beck also notes that “the bards who perform for entertainment in the area of South India where the Brothers story is most popular do not produce perfectly metered prose . instead, a rhythm was provided when the bard ‘stretched’ or ‘compacted’ those words to fit particular drum beats” (Beck 69). The bard that Beck studied, E. C. Ramacami, told the Brothers story both in a traditional performance viewed by Beck and by dictating it to her, and, though he “claimed that Green 5 he told the exact same story twice,” there were many changes noted by Beck in her comparison of the two, namely, fewer words, shortened phrases, more variation in the meters, and humor, short passages, and much of the descriptive detail was eliminated (Beck 59-60). He used essentially the same song lines, but the phrases were constantly being shifted around to fit the rhythm, just as Lord and Parry hypothesized that Homeric bards would reuse and organize common phrases into their poems to fit the dactylic hexameter, such as the use of ‘rosy-fingered dawn” in the Iliad (Beck 69). These small-scale changes imply that these long epic poems are not necessarily memorized verbatim, because improvisation is so natural in the process. Beck explains the four stages most Tamil bards pass through, as E. C. Ramacami did, as: childhood exposure through a relative, formal apprenticeship, lead singing, and singing in retirement (Beck 83-84). The second stage—formal apprenticeship—is key, as “during this period the student singer takes the role of an assistant, repeating phrases after a lead bard in actual performances . [and] he must also practice on the side” (Beck 84). These apprentice bards do not learn the Brothers story, or any other oral epic, by reading and memorizing each phrase as it appears in the written record; instead, singing with a lead bard teaches the apprentice key phrases and the art of weaving them together to tell the story. Informal and formal apprenticeship are critical parts of the learning process for Kabyle poets of north and northeast Algeria as well. The poets of Kabyle society, the ameddah, “may well know thousands of lines and recite them . he was a professional and that was the only thing he did” (Mammeri), just as rhapsodes were professional performers (Gentili 6). In a dialogue held between Pierre Bourdieu and Mouloud Mammeri, “the son of the next-to-last Green 6 amusnaw (sage, bard) of his tribe”, Mammeri explains how the poets in his tribe first undergo an informal form of apprenticeship: The village assembly .
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