Interesting that you make no reference to The Iliad. Without The Iliad the Odyssey is just a travel adventure. Planes, trains, and automobiles (see the John Candy movie) by other means. The Iliad is what gives The Odyssey its heft. The Iliad gives the Odyssey its moral and emotional weight. It's about a man suffering the staggering loss of his friends and comrades in basically a stupid war fought for no benefit to him. He gains nothing out of it. His kingdom wasn't in danger and he had no reason to fight. But he gave his word, his promise, to another ruler. He kept his word and his self respect. Now he has to keep his word to his wife. He loses basically everything, his friends, his compatriots in battle. After the fall of Troy the Greeks killed every male above the age of 12, raped all the woman and took them back to Greece as slaves. Odysseus sails home with none of that. Just his crew. No gold, no spoils of war, just his crew. And on the journey home he loses them, more because of their own selfishness and petulance than anything else Still they were his crew and a captain is responsible for his crew. He loses everything except his faith in his wife and family. He keeps his word to her and she keeps her word to him. The Odyssey is a story about a man keeping his word even to others who don't deserve it but most importantly to those who do.
Forgot to add that in a lot of similar stories there is always the trope that's it not about the destination but the journey. The journey changes the person. The point of the Odyssey is that it is about the destination. Both the physical and spiritual one. The journey is the means to an end. Odysseus is the same man he was at the start of the Iliad. The story reaffirms that.
Thank you forgot that. Haven't seen the Nolan movie. I think people have pre-hated it and also pre-loved it, all for various reasons that have nothing to do with the movie. I'll have to watch it and make up m own mind, If that is still allowed tin this day and age.
Send me the link incase I missed it. Which I probably did. My biggest gripe right now is it seems people are criticizing Nolan's movie for not making the movie they wanted him to make rather than the movie he made.
I love everything about this essay, especially listening to Shaft for the first time in decades. It IS a great song and it WOULD be a great background for the Odyssey. How enchanting to learn about Međedović - how happy it makes me to think that maybe just maybe something like this pulsating background was how Homer himself may have sung it. (Also, thanks for the Rouse recommendation - yes I got it on Kindle just now and no I am not a kid and yes I anticipate this will finally get me all the way through the Odyssey.)
The Ramayana and Mahabharata are also epic poems meant to be sung. The Mahabharata is around 100,000 shlokas (~verses) and to my knowledge an oral fluid tradition unlike the Vedas. Music and puppet theater performances rarely cover more than a section. If recited today the Mahabharata would take bards weeks to recite all the shlokas. Peter Brooks' 9 hour staging notwithstanding, modern versions, esp on screen, do not do it justice. But deft handling can keep interest alive.
Ted--I found you by accident and you have become one of my absolute favorites. As I fell in love with the Odyssey at 13 too and it launched me into all sort of great books that have added so much to my life I especially loved today's essay. Thank you!
Great piece Ted, thank you! Just a musical note: Međedović’s performance (by its sound and your good description of its effect on audiences) is (in my opinion) closer to the great minimalist works of composers like Terry Riley (example: "In C") and Steve Reich (examples: "Drumming," "Music For Eighteen Musicians") than anything else produced in the past 100 years. I say this not only because of the minimalist works' repetitive nature...but as someone who has both heard Steve Reich's ensemble perform his work and also performed them myself, I can tell you they are 100% trance-inducing. (Far more than any electronic music or jazz ever created).
Take a Steve Reich work and add vocals, and you get very close to this—I'm thinking of Reich's works with vocals like "Different Trains" which uses recorded vocal fragments of Holocaust survivors...and "Desert Music," which uses poetry by William Carlos Williams.
I heard Reich debut a piece at the Library of Congress, and I can tell you he bristled at a question about "trance music." He pretty much said, "I don't write trance music."
Excellent observation Scott. The first time I heard Music for 18 Musicians I put on the album - vinyl in those days - and listen to the whole thing, both sides, with a couple friends. We’d all just stretched out on the floor. Fantastic. No one spoke the whole time. I heard Drumming performed at SF Conservatory several years ago, almost a 1 hour performance. And it did induce the trance.
I heard Steve Reich’s ensemble perform “Drumming” at the Museum of Modern Art when I was in college. It was unforgettable. And the part I remember most is that, for an hour-plus of nonstop, pulsating music, not one person in the packed, 500-seat theater ever coughed, shuffled a foot, went to the restroom, looked at a program, or unwrapped a piece of candy. The entire audience was riveted to the stage!
When the last note was struck, there was absolute silence for what felt like a full minute, as if everyone had been holding their breath in the trance state for over an hour. Then everyone just breathed…and erupted into thunderous applause!
When I went through the Odyssey recently (as part of Ted's Humanities course), I chose an audio version. Listening was much more enjoyable and exciting than reading the text! What I came to love the most were the repeated phrases - "the rosy fingered dawn" - which got me every time. Believe it was the Fagles translation.
I went audio because it seemed closer to the oral tradition. Now realizing that it may have been sung or chanted adds another interesting twist.
Good point! I sometimes do the same with dense material. Sun Tzu's Art of War was great as an audiobook. Also the information enters our consciousness through the right brain rather than the left when we listen instead of read. (I can't back this up with any studies though... it's my intuitive understanding - as a musician.)
That's interesting what you're saying about reading. I'm plowing through your Great Books series, just finished the Analectics, and was curious why Confucius placed so much emphasis on music. Maybe for the same reason -- to educate the common people who didn't read.
Thank you for reminding me of one of the most engaging courses I experienced in college: Albert Lord’s “The Oral Tradition”. (Yes, that woke Harvard). From Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Kalevala to Homer and beyond. Lord brought the oral tradition forward to the then-current movie Bonnie and Clyde, which had through lines back centuries to tales of heroes in many divergent cultures. (I think he was also a friend of actress Faye Dunaway. ) You are so right to remind us that stories passed down from oral tradition can be both entertaining and meaningful in the dystopian 2020’s.
OMG, this is freaking AWESOME!! And yes—definitely ritualistic in intensity (especially the first one). I'm gonna be watching these repeatedly for a while and want to learn more about these artists!! Thanks for posting!
I'm not sure how recitative evolved...but that's an interesting point—it does have at least some resemblance to this traditional Korean form of singing. (I'm thinking of recitative like you might find in a Mozart opera: harpsichord chord...followed by a long, melodic vocal passage...another harpsichord chord, followed by another long vocal passage, etc.)
And yes—I love the combination of the traditional vocal style with the modern background grooves.
I saw John McLaughlin with Shakti in the 70s at my college. I was heavily into Fusion, Prog, Jazz, but I had never experienced anything like this. Along with the musical fireworks, there were passages that were trance-like. It was otherworldly. It changed my perception of what a live musical experience could be. Not long after, Chicago played at our very small college before a major world tour. It's a long story how that happened, but they were testing out a new massive sound system and played lengthy trance-inducing jazz pieces that never were played live elsewhere. Not commercial enough. I almost fell off the bleachers from going into some kind of mellow state. (No drugs were involved on my part!)
Wow, you were privileged to experience a concert where the band is experimenting. That happens rarely, especially with a commercially successful group.
Literature or song? Is song the most overlooked form of literature? Or is it a separate cultural form altogether? Possibly the most widely performed and enjoyed of all present day cultural forms, yet somehow deemed inferior to poetry or music. Maybe giving the Nobel for literature to a singer/songwriter a few years back should have opened up more of a debate.
Sandeep Mehta's mention of the Indian epics reminds me of the Korean tradition of storytelling through song. An accessible instantiation of this is the through-line in the movie, Chunhyang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunhyang_%28film%29?wprov=sfla1
I'll keep looking! I love the YouTube you gave of a man singing out the first 21 lines of the Iliad. As for reading, I've listened to Emily Wilson's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which are fantastic and much better listened to. There are many versions. For example, I've heard Ian McKellen act out the Robert Fagles Odyssey. Most importantly, by acting through the scenes he reveals a power. Where is the art?--in acting it out or rhythmically chanting to transform. I'm not sure. I'll keep looking.
Odyssey comes from the name of a man defined by suffering. The Greek Odysseus may derive from a root meaning grief or wrath. The word for a long journey was always about what it costs.
Everything you're describing is still alive in the Brazilian Northeast. Repentistas improvise sung verse in duels, same formulaic engine as Homer. The gusle's job done by a viola. Thanks for sending me back to it.
Interesting that you make no reference to The Iliad. Without The Iliad the Odyssey is just a travel adventure. Planes, trains, and automobiles (see the John Candy movie) by other means. The Iliad is what gives The Odyssey its heft. The Iliad gives the Odyssey its moral and emotional weight. It's about a man suffering the staggering loss of his friends and comrades in basically a stupid war fought for no benefit to him. He gains nothing out of it. His kingdom wasn't in danger and he had no reason to fight. But he gave his word, his promise, to another ruler. He kept his word and his self respect. Now he has to keep his word to his wife. He loses basically everything, his friends, his compatriots in battle. After the fall of Troy the Greeks killed every male above the age of 12, raped all the woman and took them back to Greece as slaves. Odysseus sails home with none of that. Just his crew. No gold, no spoils of war, just his crew. And on the journey home he loses them, more because of their own selfishness and petulance than anything else Still they were his crew and a captain is responsible for his crew. He loses everything except his faith in his wife and family. He keeps his word to her and she keeps her word to him. The Odyssey is a story about a man keeping his word even to others who don't deserve it but most importantly to those who do.
I like what Christopher Logue did with the writing of "War Music: An Account of the Iliad."
"Picture the east Aegean sea by night
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal fleet.
Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
a ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
runs with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes:
Then kneel among those, panes, burst into tear and say:
Mother,
You said that you and God were friends."
That's Achilles running to explain to his mother, Thetis ,his beef against Agamemnon. Meant to be read aloud, recited.
Thank you. I was unaware of that. Have to seek it out. Seems it could be a movie in its own right.
Then he did gain something from it. More valuable than gold or slaves.
Forgot to add that in a lot of similar stories there is always the trope that's it not about the destination but the journey. The journey changes the person. The point of the Odyssey is that it is about the destination. Both the physical and spiritual one. The journey is the means to an end. Odysseus is the same man he was at the start of the Iliad. The story reaffirms that.
When someone asks Odysseus his name, he replies "My name is at my journey's end."
Thank you forgot that. Haven't seen the Nolan movie. I think people have pre-hated it and also pre-loved it, all for various reasons that have nothing to do with the movie. I'll have to watch it and make up m own mind, If that is still allowed tin this day and age.
I published my article mentioning today.... quite different than Ted's take.
Send me the link incase I missed it. Which I probably did. My biggest gripe right now is it seems people are criticizing Nolan's movie for not making the movie they wanted him to make rather than the movie he made.
I love everything about this essay, especially listening to Shaft for the first time in decades. It IS a great song and it WOULD be a great background for the Odyssey. How enchanting to learn about Međedović - how happy it makes me to think that maybe just maybe something like this pulsating background was how Homer himself may have sung it. (Also, thanks for the Rouse recommendation - yes I got it on Kindle just now and no I am not a kid and yes I anticipate this will finally get me all the way through the Odyssey.)
"That Odysseus is a bad mutha-"
"shut yo mouth"...
"I'm just talkin' 'bout Odysseus!"
The Ramayana and Mahabharata are also epic poems meant to be sung. The Mahabharata is around 100,000 shlokas (~verses) and to my knowledge an oral fluid tradition unlike the Vedas. Music and puppet theater performances rarely cover more than a section. If recited today the Mahabharata would take bards weeks to recite all the shlokas. Peter Brooks' 9 hour staging notwithstanding, modern versions, esp on screen, do not do it justice. But deft handling can keep interest alive.
I’ll always wonder how many epic sagas around the world have been lost because the bards died off before the sagas they sang could be written down.
I’ll also wonder how many different variations of the various tales existed.
Ted--I found you by accident and you have become one of my absolute favorites. As I fell in love with the Odyssey at 13 too and it launched me into all sort of great books that have added so much to my life I especially loved today's essay. Thank you!
Great piece Ted, thank you! Just a musical note: Međedović’s performance (by its sound and your good description of its effect on audiences) is (in my opinion) closer to the great minimalist works of composers like Terry Riley (example: "In C") and Steve Reich (examples: "Drumming," "Music For Eighteen Musicians") than anything else produced in the past 100 years. I say this not only because of the minimalist works' repetitive nature...but as someone who has both heard Steve Reich's ensemble perform his work and also performed them myself, I can tell you they are 100% trance-inducing. (Far more than any electronic music or jazz ever created).
Take a Steve Reich work and add vocals, and you get very close to this—I'm thinking of Reich's works with vocals like "Different Trains" which uses recorded vocal fragments of Holocaust survivors...and "Desert Music," which uses poetry by William Carlos Williams.
I heard Reich debut a piece at the Library of Congress, and I can tell you he bristled at a question about "trance music." He pretty much said, "I don't write trance music."
Ha! I believe he said that. My response is "Whatever." LOL It's trance music. And classical. And contemporary. And other genres too, probably.
Excellent observation Scott. The first time I heard Music for 18 Musicians I put on the album - vinyl in those days - and listen to the whole thing, both sides, with a couple friends. We’d all just stretched out on the floor. Fantastic. No one spoke the whole time. I heard Drumming performed at SF Conservatory several years ago, almost a 1 hour performance. And it did induce the trance.
I heard Steve Reich’s ensemble perform “Drumming” at the Museum of Modern Art when I was in college. It was unforgettable. And the part I remember most is that, for an hour-plus of nonstop, pulsating music, not one person in the packed, 500-seat theater ever coughed, shuffled a foot, went to the restroom, looked at a program, or unwrapped a piece of candy. The entire audience was riveted to the stage!
When the last note was struck, there was absolute silence for what felt like a full minute, as if everyone had been holding their breath in the trance state for over an hour. Then everyone just breathed…and erupted into thunderous applause!
I don't know about Reich, but I suspect Terry Riley would agree with you on the trance thing... Especially because he did study with Indian masters.
When I went through the Odyssey recently (as part of Ted's Humanities course), I chose an audio version. Listening was much more enjoyable and exciting than reading the text! What I came to love the most were the repeated phrases - "the rosy fingered dawn" - which got me every time. Believe it was the Fagles translation.
I went audio because it seemed closer to the oral tradition. Now realizing that it may have been sung or chanted adds another interesting twist.
Good point! I sometimes do the same with dense material. Sun Tzu's Art of War was great as an audiobook. Also the information enters our consciousness through the right brain rather than the left when we listen instead of read. (I can't back this up with any studies though... it's my intuitive understanding - as a musician.)
That's interesting what you're saying about reading. I'm plowing through your Great Books series, just finished the Analectics, and was curious why Confucius placed so much emphasis on music. Maybe for the same reason -- to educate the common people who didn't read.
"But I will insist that Rouse is the superior version for a youngster." Agreed! And, if I'm honest, for many adults.
Most....adults.
Thank you for reminding me of one of the most engaging courses I experienced in college: Albert Lord’s “The Oral Tradition”. (Yes, that woke Harvard). From Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Kalevala to Homer and beyond. Lord brought the oral tradition forward to the then-current movie Bonnie and Clyde, which had through lines back centuries to tales of heroes in many divergent cultures. (I think he was also a friend of actress Faye Dunaway. ) You are so right to remind us that stories passed down from oral tradition can be both entertaining and meaningful in the dystopian 2020’s.
"Ritualistic intensity"...
Like this? (Would Homer approve?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8STADdZ0hac
Or this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmTRaSg2fTQ
OMG, this is freaking AWESOME!! And yes—definitely ritualistic in intensity (especially the first one). I'm gonna be watching these repeatedly for a while and want to learn more about these artists!! Thanks for posting!
It appears those Korean groups borrow heavily from pansori but put it in a contemporary setting.
In the west, did recitative evolve in a similar manner? Or is this a bad choice to compare and contrast?
I'm not sure how recitative evolved...but that's an interesting point—it does have at least some resemblance to this traditional Korean form of singing. (I'm thinking of recitative like you might find in a Mozart opera: harpsichord chord...followed by a long, melodic vocal passage...another harpsichord chord, followed by another long vocal passage, etc.)
And yes—I love the combination of the traditional vocal style with the modern background grooves.
I saw John McLaughlin with Shakti in the 70s at my college. I was heavily into Fusion, Prog, Jazz, but I had never experienced anything like this. Along with the musical fireworks, there were passages that were trance-like. It was otherworldly. It changed my perception of what a live musical experience could be. Not long after, Chicago played at our very small college before a major world tour. It's a long story how that happened, but they were testing out a new massive sound system and played lengthy trance-inducing jazz pieces that never were played live elsewhere. Not commercial enough. I almost fell off the bleachers from going into some kind of mellow state. (No drugs were involved on my part!)
Shakti were mind-boggling! I agree regarding the trance-like aspect of some of their works. See my comment above about the music of Steve Reich...
Wow, you were privileged to experience a concert where the band is experimenting. That happens rarely, especially with a commercially successful group.
Literature or song? Is song the most overlooked form of literature? Or is it a separate cultural form altogether? Possibly the most widely performed and enjoyed of all present day cultural forms, yet somehow deemed inferior to poetry or music. Maybe giving the Nobel for literature to a singer/songwriter a few years back should have opened up more of a debate.
Sandeep Mehta's mention of the Indian epics reminds me of the Korean tradition of storytelling through song. An accessible instantiation of this is the through-line in the movie, Chunhyang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunhyang_%28film%29?wprov=sfla1
I'll keep looking! I love the YouTube you gave of a man singing out the first 21 lines of the Iliad. As for reading, I've listened to Emily Wilson's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which are fantastic and much better listened to. There are many versions. For example, I've heard Ian McKellen act out the Robert Fagles Odyssey. Most importantly, by acting through the scenes he reveals a power. Where is the art?--in acting it out or rhythmically chanting to transform. I'm not sure. I'll keep looking.
Odyssey comes from the name of a man defined by suffering. The Greek Odysseus may derive from a root meaning grief or wrath. The word for a long journey was always about what it costs.
Everything you're describing is still alive in the Brazilian Northeast. Repentistas improvise sung verse in duels, same formulaic engine as Homer. The gusle's job done by a viola. Thanks for sending me back to it.