Page 9 - GALIET MUSIC´S METAPHOR: The House of Atreus IV

Fissures. Music is the symbolic representation of polarities and differences. For Victor Zuckerkandl1, music is the place where being manifests itself while language is the place where the world of entity and things manifest themselves. For Ortiz-Oses2, the difference is clear: verbal language “visualizes” and “confronts” reality while musical language “hears” and “affronts” a relational reality. From this observation, Ortiz-Oses suggests that we can obtain a quasi-musical interpretation of the senses since for Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato reality is conceived as a concordance of dissonances. For Nietzsche and Gadamer3, music is the only model of interpretation of reality since the musical composer not only harmonizes noise into sound but also gathers the diversity of sounds and correlates them to the text of a poem, epic, tragic or comic play. Thus, the tension of music not only emerges from the text’s polarities, but it also coheres with it. Such beautiful coherences are manifested in Aeschylus’ modern act of the Oresteia. Although “The House of Atreus” is deficient in classical theatrical elements 3⁄4 masks, lavish costumes, all male actors and settings (the Frederick Wood Theatre is neither Epidaurus nor the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens) 3⁄4 it does exude in its musical- textual rendition. The deeply moving alternations between drums, pipes and lyres and between song and speech achieve a spellbinding effect of the Oresteia, entirely not foreign to classical Athens.4 In the same manner, the theatrical representations of textual tapestries, Agamemnon’s murder, Cassandra’s kommos and the Erinyes’ dread
1 Zuckerkandl, V. Eranos-30 (1961), Diccionario de Hermeneutica. Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao: 2001.
2 Andres Ortiz-Oses, “Interpretacion de Sentido y Musica” Diccionario de Hermeneutica. Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao: 2001. 384-385.
3 Gadamer, H.G. Verdad y Metodo (en torno al arte y juego) en Diccioniario de Hermeneutica. Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao: 2001.
4 Professor Sheramy Bundrick in her upcoming book Music and Image in Classical Athens from the University of South Florida argues that music became a visual metaphor for the harmony - or disharmony - of the city.
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