Antiphony is a mode of performance in which two voices respond to one another.
In 1992, theorist Paul Gilroy considered the "familialization of politics" in relation to black popular culture and proposed an "ethics of
antiphony." The trope of the heterosexual blood family was confronted with the "fragile image of nonfamilial community" in the performer-audience relation, and hence with the idea of community as something to be enacted and experienced as performance.
Porto Alegre has many important writers (as does Curitiba, the other second-tier metropolitan area of the country), but there is very much of the sense of an
antiphony between metropolis and province in the case of writers who are not identified with Rio and Sao Paulo.
The prophetic foreshadowing that occurs in the
antiphony between the young Equiano and the Igbo wise men, simultaneously invites and obscures any simple interpretation or meaning in the narrative movement between the "ominous" and "harmless" as represented in Equiano's snake imagery.
This is so whether we discuss (as Cavell does in this quotation) the
antiphony between Wittgenstein and American Pragmatism, or from within Cavell's own writings.
Yes, from Ellison's notes and drafts Callahan has fashioned a shapely synecdoche that coheres-a duet between "Daddy" Hickman, the black Southern preacher who's come to Washington in 1955 to warn a man he raised as a boy of impending violence, and Sunraider, the white New England senator who was brought up black but turned savagely on the color of this kindness; a Lincoln-haunted and Oedipus-inflected dialogue of down-home homilies, grandiose dreams and primal crime; a dialectic of masked pasts and screened memories; a call-and-response
antiphony of flimflam riffs; a matched fall of twinned tricksters into shared mystery, lost history and filmed illusions.
Moreover, in descriptions of the public mourning over Hector's body, we are told that the bards were seated next to the body in order to lead the funerary songs or threnoi, with the women alternately taking up the song in
antiphony. Still, Nagy remarks, the epic poem presents the contents only of the gooi, whereas the threnoi are only alluded to, without any indication of their contents.
In a recent study of Byrd's string fantasia a 6 in g, no.1, I took issue with Oliver Neighbour over his use of the terms `antiphony' and 'antiphonal' to describe features of Byrd's consort music.(1) My reasoning was that in single-group consort music
antiphony proper (that is, between two spatially separated groups of performers) is not possible; that Byrd and others sometimes created an antiphonal effect by alternating a high-pitched subgroup with a low-pitched one; and that the exchange of material between instruments of the same pitch, which is effectively precluded by this `pitch-range
antiphony', is better treated as `voice exchange' or `phrase exchange'.
Langer believes the "prayer's" juxtaposition introduces "a dreadful
antiphony that polarizes two possible realities of the Holocaust even as it attempts to interweave them" (263).
My first
Antiphony was made in 1958: a work for three string groups and tape.