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Hidden Choral Stimuli : The Role of Accent in Aristophanes’ Refrains

Thörn Cleland, Albin Ruben Johannes LU orcid (2026)
Abstract (Swedish)
The final day of the conference opened with Albin Thörn Cleland’s presentation, “Hidden Choral Stimuli: The Role of Accent in Aristophanes’ Refrains”. His paper examined the interplay of pitch accent, metre and musical melody across metrically identical refrains in pre-Hellenistic Ancient Greek lyric poetry, an aspect that has long remained relatively obscure and misunderstood. Building on Conser (2020), who first operationalized the link between the orthographic surface and the theory of music and prosody (“melodic compatibility”) through open-source software, Thörn Cleland has made a new framework that extends functionality. Where Conser worked with the antistrophic two-refrain songs of tragedy, the new software is bespoke to the... (More)
The final day of the conference opened with Albin Thörn Cleland’s presentation, “Hidden Choral Stimuli: The Role of Accent in Aristophanes’ Refrains”. His paper examined the interplay of pitch accent, metre and musical melody across metrically identical refrains in pre-Hellenistic Ancient Greek lyric poetry, an aspect that has long remained relatively obscure and misunderstood. Building on Conser (2020), who first operationalized the link between the orthographic surface and the theory of music and prosody (“melodic compatibility”) through open-source software, Thörn Cleland has made a new framework that extends functionality. Where Conser worked with the antistrophic two-refrain songs of tragedy, the new software is bespoke to the multi-refrain songs of comedy. Drawing on a corpus of all 79 multirefrain songs in Aristophanes, Thörn Cleland performed three statistical tests. The first, a chi-square significance test, introduced two methodological refinements over Conser’s approach: (1) using lyric tetrameter baselines rather than iambic recitative, and (2) generating one hundred randomized baselines instead of only a few. This test showed that only the two-refrain songs reached significance (P = 0.0001). The second analysis, a linear regression of the songs ordered chronologically, indicated no diachronic trend in melodic compatibility—contrary to Conser’s findings for Aeschylus. Finally, Thörn Cleland demonstrated that the final syllable of each verse line exhibits exceptional melodic compatibility, even though no overall linear tendency is observed. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to conference
publication status
in press
subject
project
Accentual Responsion in Pindar
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
204c8d72-7fa4-4b45-af51-4655fa8054a6
date added to LUP
2026-03-02 10:30:04
date last changed
2026-04-13 08:58:45
@misc{204c8d72-7fa4-4b45-af51-4655fa8054a6,
  abstract     = {{The final day of the conference opened with Albin Thörn Cleland’s presentation, “Hidden Choral Stimuli: The Role of Accent in Aristophanes’ Refrains”. His paper examined the interplay of pitch accent, metre and musical melody across metrically identical refrains in pre-Hellenistic Ancient Greek lyric poetry, an aspect that has long remained relatively obscure and misunderstood. Building on Conser (2020), who first operationalized the link between the orthographic surface and the theory of music and prosody (“melodic compatibility”) through open-source software, Thörn Cleland has made a new framework that extends functionality. Where Conser worked with the antistrophic two-refrain songs of tragedy, the new software is bespoke to the multi-refrain songs of comedy. Drawing on a corpus of all 79 multirefrain songs in Aristophanes, Thörn Cleland performed three statistical tests. The first, a chi-square significance test, introduced two methodological refinements over Conser’s approach: (1) using lyric tetrameter baselines rather than iambic recitative, and (2) generating one hundred randomized baselines instead of only a few. This test showed that only the two-refrain songs reached significance (P = 0.0001). The second analysis, a linear regression of the songs ordered chronologically, indicated no diachronic trend in melodic compatibility—contrary to Conser’s findings for Aeschylus. Finally, Thörn Cleland demonstrated that the final syllable of each verse line exhibits exceptional melodic compatibility, even though no overall linear tendency is observed.}},
  author       = {{Thörn Cleland, Albin Ruben Johannes}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  title        = {{Hidden Choral Stimuli : The Role of Accent in Aristophanes’ Refrains}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}