After many years, a piece by Quintilian on music, taken fromOratory Institute. We asked Mara Aschei, who has a long experience as a Latin and Greek teacher at classical high school and is now involved in the Latin lecturer for freshmen at the University of Pavia, for a comment on the chosen passageto understand its scope and possible pitfalls: «Not a bad text, not a strange one as there have sometimes been, especially in Greek in the past, given without taking into account the real skills acquired at that age”, explains Professor Aschei: “An accessible syntax, without too many subordinate clauses, a lexicon which also does not pose major translation problems. Some difficulties, however, may arise from the fact that it is a chain of examples, which refer to well-known figures. I hope that the candidates have read the translated introduction well to orient themselves: Socrates, Plato, Lycurgus are well-known figures, but if you are not careful about the passages from one example to another you risk being led astray: we must follow the train of thought step by step among five examples of different types, detached, not introduced, which perhaps were obvious to Quintilian’s readers but which are not necessarily obvious to those who read the passage for the first time today. This requires a bit of awareness and flexibility that students under examination do not always manage to have. During the exam, help could come from the president of the commission or the subject commissioner reading the text aloud: the pauses in the right places are helpful, because there are phrases that require careful reading, to avoid the risk of connecting words in an irrelevant way and misunderstanding, in that sense it is a challenging Latin.”
There don’t seem to be any major pitfalls in the words used, but: «A little trap could have come from musicsa case with a Greek form: by studying the classic you can get there, but if the tension of the exam plays tricks on you, this particular form can be confusing. It can help the use of vocabulary, if it is recorded, but it is also a question of understanding how much a student depends on the use of vocabulary and how trained he is to consult it: since we are talking about music, not stopping at the first meaning and knowing how to quickly orient yourself in the semantic areas of a vocabulary item helps.”
Italian studies teachers make it clear that, accustomed to online dictionaries, many children they now struggle with paper dictionaries: «This, if there is one, can be a problem, because it is a skill that must be trained with practice beforehand and cannot be improvised on the day of the exam».
Coming from the version to the comment questions, we note a difference between the first two questions and the third: «For the first two questions, the topics and linguistic structure are guided by the track, as is the search for the two semantic fields of music and war. The most difficult question is the third, on the role of music in the ancient world and in the contemporary world: a big question. It seems a bit risky to me to offer a generic and broad topic, on which entire libraries could be written, with an answer to be given in ten lines: I trust in the fact that each commission takes what arrives a little at face value, because at 19 it’s really difficult not to say banalities with a request like that, maybe those who have studied music can have an advantage: but it’s also a question of asking what music is for a young person today…”.
