Draft:James Notopoulos

James Anastasios Notopoulos (4 July 1905, Altoona, PA – 17 October 1967, West Hartford, CT) was a Greek-American classical scholar and Homerist. He recorder and published folk songs from Greece and Cyprus.

Early life and education

His parents were from Greece and emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. His father was Anastasios Nicholas Notopoulos (Greek: Αναστάσιος Νικόλας Νοτόπουλος), born in the 19th century in Tripoli died in May 1960, Pinellas, Florida, and his mother Helen Ververis N. born in Greece they got married on 29 Aug 1903 in Tripolis. They had seven children. He was a student at Mercersburg Academy, graduating in 1924. Then Notopoulos attained a BA in 1928 from Amherst and an MA from Jesus College, Oxford in 1934.

Academic carer

Notopoulos worked as a professor of Classics at Trinity College at Hurtford, Connecticut.

District manager Penware, Pennler, Alpenn Theatres Corporation in Western Pennsylvania, 1933-1936. Instructor Greek, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, 1936-1938, assistant professor classics, 1938-1946, Hobart professor classics, since 1946. University seminar associate classical civilization Columbia University, since 1959, member Latin committee College Board Entrance Exams, since 1955.

Visiting assistant professor classics, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 1938-1939.

James A. Notopoulos is best known for his studies of Plato's influence on Shelley and of Homer as an oral poet. One of his major works is The Platonism of Shelley. Notopoulos went on to write essays on classical influences on Byron, Keats, Emerson, Yeats, T. E. Lawrence, and Kazantzakis. He was also interested in Greek epigraphy, to which he had been introduced by Tod of Oxford and Ferguson of Harvard. Continuing the work of Ferguson, who had discovered that the twelve Athenian tribes had provided secretaries for the government of Athens in regular and predictable cycles down to the time of Sulla in the first century BC, Notopoulos showed that this "law" continued into the third century AD. He thus provided the framework for re-dating many official inscriptions and for establishing the chronology of Athens under the Roman Empire.

Notopoulos' third major interest was in continuing the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in viewing Homer as an oral poet.

Recordings of folk songs in Greece and Cyprus

In September 1952, Notopoulos, traveled to Greece with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Philosophical Society to make audio recordings of traditional Greek music and oral poetry. He aimed at creating a similar study to that of Milman Parry and Albert Lord groundbreaking work in the southern Balkans. During his research he was based in the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he was serving as visiting professor, from where he embarked on field trips until August 1953. He recorded singers, oral poets, instrumentalists, and storytellers in villages and towns across mainland Greece, the islands of Crete and Naxos, and Cyprus. In total, he gathered 645 performances, roughly 90 hours of vocal and instrumental music, on 157 double-sided reel-to-reel tapes. Additionally, he recorded nearly an hour of color and black and white films, and several hundred color photographs, that have been digitized and catalogued between 2013-2018. The collection is remarkable because it spans many popular genres and regional styles of traditional and liturgical music in Greece, Notopoulos recorded multiple variations of songs from various locales and sometimes different versions of a single composition from the same performer and it has excellent audio quality. He recorded the oral epics and ballads still being sung and improvised by poets and traveling minstrels, some of which went back to the Middle Ages but some of which dealt with the Greek War of Independence in the 19th century and even the Nazi invasion of Crete during the World War II. Many of the songs use centuries-old musical and poetic techniques to narrate recent occurrences such as the Italian invasion, Nazi occupation, and other events from World War II.

The result of this study was the recording of more than 1,500 folk songs and ballads on tape, which were copied and deposited in the Library of Congress and excerpts of which were embodied in the C. N. Jackson Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1962 and published in a lengthy article, "Studies in Early Greek Oral Poetry." Notopoulos' original recordings and slides, as well as his unfinished book on oral literature in Greece, were given to Harvard after his death and are stored there in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.

These recordings were later issued on Moe Asch's Folkways label:

• Folk Dances of Greece (FE 4454; previously released as Folkways P 454)
• Folk Dances of Greece (FE 4467)
• Modern Greek Heroic Oral Poetry (FE 4468)

The James A. Notopoulos Collection (ca. 50 reel-to-reel audio tapes) is at Harvard University (Widener Library, Room C, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA 02138).

At the Libarry of Congress (American Folklife Center; Archive of Folk Culture): AFS 10,943-10,967: Twenty-five tapes of Greek heroic poetry, folk tales, and folk songs collected by James A. Notopoulos, 1952-1953.

In 1967 he published the work Homer and the Contemporary Heroic Oral Poetry. A study of Compara­tive Oral Literature a study that contributed greatly in the subject of comparative studies between Homeric and Modern Greek literature.

She wrote to James Notopoulos , whose album of Greek folk music had been released by Folkways the previous year.two of the dances included by James Notopoulos in his 1955 recording of Folk Music of Greece are relevant to the opera

After his death in 1967 his widow donated his archive to Harvard. The James A. Notopoulos Collection of Modern Greek Ballads and Songs is part of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.

Personal life

He married Jean McKerihan on 1 May 1934. Jean McKerihan was born on 12 May 1909 in the state of Pennsilvania and died on 29 May 1999, Farmington, Hartford, Connecticut, USA at the age of 90. They have two children Joseph J. born 1940 or 1944 in Hartford, Connecticut and Philip J. born in March 1945 in Hartford, Connecticut.

Publications

• Notopoulos, J. A. (1938). Mnemosyne in Oral Literature. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 69, 465–493. https://doi.org/10.2307/283194
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1941). The Slaves at the Battle of Marathon. The American Journal of Philology, 62(3), 352-354. https://doi.org/10.2307/291670
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1944). The Symbolism of the Sun and Light in the Republic of Plato. II. Classical Philology, 39(4), 223–240.
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1952). The Warrior as an Oral Poet: A Case History. The Classical Weekly, 46(2), 17–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/4343240
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1952). Homer and Cretan Heroic Poetry: A Study in Comparative Oral Poetry. The American Journal of Philology, 73(3), 225–250. https://doi.org/10.2307/292135
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1955). New Sources on Lord Byron at Missolonghi. Keats-Shelley Journal, 4, 31–45.
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1960). Homer, Hesiod and the Achaean Heritage of Oral Poetry. Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 29(2), 177–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/147293
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1962). The Homeric Hymns as Oral Poetry; A Study of the Post-Homeric Oral Tradition. The American Journal of Philology, 83(4), 337–368. https://doi.org/10.2307/292918
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1964). Akritan Ikonography on Byzantine Pottery. Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 33(2), 108–133. https://doi.org/10.2307/147182
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1964). Studies in Early Greek Oral Poetry. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 68, 1–77. https://doi.org/10.2307/310798
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1966). “Truth-Beauty” in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and the Elgin Marbles. The Modern Language Review, 61(2), 180–182. https://doi.org/10.2307/3720744
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1967). Homer and the Contemporary Heroic Oral Poetry. A study of Compara­tive Oral Literature.
• Notopoulos, J. A. (1969). The Platonism of Shelley, A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind.

Publications about Notopoulos

• Αντωνακόπουλος, Γ. Ν. (2005). Μια άγνωστη σειρά δίσκων Ελληνικής μουσικής στις ΗΠΑ. Λαϊκό Τραγούδι, 13, 16-19.

Discography

• Folk dances of Greece (1956) Folkways Records, New York.

External links

• The James A. Notopoulos Collection of Modern Greek Ballads and Songs at the Center for Hellenic Studies
• Spreadsheet with detailed notes on the contents of the Notopoulos Collection
• Notopoulos Recordings
• James A Notopoulos collection of Greek poetry, music, and tales at the Library of Congress