Andromache Karanika.Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece.

Abstract

Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece sets itself an ambitious agenda: to study work songs of Ancient Greece and explore how these informed early Greek poetics, while uncovering some lost voices of women singers and providing new information about the context of this genre, normally considered a lower species of the song culture. Although she focuses on the pre-Classical period, Andromache Karanika also provides some material from fifth-century tragedy and Hellenistic sources. Throughout, she argues—successfully—for genre fluidity. Work songs shared features with songs of lamentation, wedding songs, lullabies, children’s songs, and harvest songs. Using comparative material from modern Greece, she argues for generic overlap in performance venues too. For example, lamentation songs were/are not out of place at weddings. That there were common motifs and musical features in songs of different genres and that they were not confined to particular contexts is not surprising. It permits Karanika to make the important point that often women and individuals from the lower classes who sang their work songs in private provided lyrics that were reproduced or reformulated in public venues.