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Document Details : Title: Sound as Symbol Subtitle: The Case in Pagan and Christian Armenian Poetics Author(s): RUSSEL, James R. Journal: Le Muséon Volume: 109 Issue: 1-2 Date: 1996 Pages: 113-126 DOI: 10.2143/MUS.109.1.525821 Abstract : The ideas of mantra and sacred sound, where music and articulate speech meet, are usually considered in the context of Indo-Iranian religion or Greek poetics. Armenia presents an interesting, additional case, since it is an ancient Indo-European nation at the historical, geographical and cultural nexus of the Indo-Iranian and Hellenistic worlds. The author considers how Armenian poetry sings the sound of creation. In Armenian compositions of pagan antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages, God and His creation are described by a system of symbolic sounds, enabling poets to paint a cosmology with the intellectual density of a text and the emotional color of a musical composition. |
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