Page 12 - GALIET MUSIC´S METAPHOR: The House of Atreus IV

of Athens’ transition. Therefore, the staging of dissonant articulations and enunciations 3⁄4 Apollonian lyres, speeches, murmurs and whispers against Dionysian drums, lyric lamentations, wails and chants 3⁄4 convey the stressed and unstressed, the phonic and aphonic within the soul of tragedy. The phonic can be said to represent the outward expression of terror and the aphonic the inward expression of suffering recalling Aeschyleus’ maxim that we learn by suffering. Suffering, thus, is not only deeply felt in the musical agonies among drums, pipe and lyre but also felt in the space where speech and lyrics confront and collide with reality.
Not only are the alternations of instruments and modes of speech beautiful to listen to in their pathos, but also the artful textual representation of the tapestries. Under fictions of sun, the iridescent purple tapestries menstruate and flow from the palace’s hearth in drumming majesty.7 The delicate, yet sumptuous lighting effect that blurs royal purple and bloody red through the meters and meters of rolling tapestries plays poignantly on the imagination of modern audiences. As Agamemnon solemnly ascends the stairs barefoot, the tapestries, like Zeus’ golden scales, shift their weight from regal purples to polluted reds with every single one of his steps forward while intense percussion thunders in the theatre. Agamemnon, in not exercising restraint to walk on the purple of the gods, incurs hubris; however, this is only secondary to Clytemnestra’s menses of vengeance. Thus, the sensual, wine-like, dual nature and double meaning of the tapestries becomes a Dionysian trap for Agamemnon for not too far, we hear Pentheus’ frightening echo, “I see two suns, two Thebes, twice seven its gates. A bull beckons me...”8 This is the very same double vision, or reality blur, that beckons and blinds
7The lengthy flowing of the tapestries would be impossible if the skene were to be placed on the centre of the stage.
8 Euripides. The Bacchae. Trans. Rudall, Nicholas. Dee, Chicago: 1996. Lines 918-921
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