As a set of social, performative, literary, and reflective practices, ancient Greek mousikē aligns more with a modern, holistic view of culture than with a traditional audiocentric notion of music. Twenty years ago, the essays collected by Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson in Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousikē in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford 2004, BMCR 2004.07.16) opened our eyes to this insight. The volume Music: antiquity and its legacy now mirrors a similar shift within reception studies, moving from a focus on ‘music itself’ to its cultural implications. The challenge is formidable, and it becomes even more so because the book—like other volumes in the Ancients and Moderns series—is primarily intended for students and general readers. As a leading scholar of ancient Greek music, Eleonora Rocconi is the ideal person to take on this challenge.
The stated focus “on the legacy of ancient Greek music and musical ideas in musical culture” (p. 9, emphasis in the original) signals the aforementioned shift. Throughout the book, an insightful discussion of Greek aesthetic, ethical, and political ideas about music is intertwined with analyses of how these ideas resonate with key issues in modern musical discourse. The book excels particularly in the first part of this juxtaposition. The selection and portrayal of major themes in ancient musical thought are masterful, touching upon considerable detail that, alongside the thirty pages of notes and five hundred entries in the bibliography, renders the book a valuable resource. A wide range of musically relevant Greek terms are transliterated, translated and explained, whereas strictly musical technicalities are wisely held to a minimum. Even a small selection of pertinent Greek texts is cited, mostly in Andrew Barker’s translation. Thus, readers with no prior training in classics can access and appreciate the material. Archaeological and iconographic evidence is rarely considered, and the ten black-and-white figures, mostly showing image-bearing artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, serve only as illustrations. A comprehensive General Index greatly facilitates the retrieval of specific information. The editorial quality is high.
In “Introduction: History of an Idea(l)”, a concise historical overview is provided of the modern engagement with surviving ancient melodies recorded in musical notation, starting with the year 1581, when Vincenzo Galilei published the first known such specimens in his Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna. To consider this discovery a pivotal moment, as the author appears to suggest, might be overstating its impact. Indeed, Chapter 2 will discuss efforts to reform musical practice that had already been underway before and that persisted after Galilei’s discovery without relying on specific ancient musical pieces as models. Given that innovations like chromaticism and the balanced integration of words and music, along with other stylistic elements in mid-sixteenth-century vocal polyphony, were the audible outcomes of these efforts, it might be excessive to assert that prior to 1581, “ancient Greek music was an inaudible idea” (p. 1).
The core of the book is organized thematically. Chapter 1 (“Key Terms and Concepts”) effectively acquaints the reader with Greek concepts like mousikē, technē, choreia, paideia, katharsis or harmonia and with the major ancient sources on them including Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Aristophanes, Pindar and the Pythagorean tradition. No modern definition could better illustrate the wide range of activities, contexts and functions encompassed under the umbrella of mousikē than the synoptic overview, presented in a series of tables based on Hesiod, of what the speaking names of the Muses literally mean. While maintaining proximity to the sources, the author discusses how ancient ideas enrich the modern discourses on the performative nature of music and literature in general (and of ancient Greek poetry and drama in particular), on the enduring dominance of the written text as the essential locus of musical and literary culture, on the role of music in education and politics, and on the therapeutic and psychagogic properties of music.
In Chapter 2 (“Theoretical Models”) the focus is on music as a specialized theoretical discipline (epistēmē). Here, in contrast to the practice of music, the author traces continuity from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and even to the present. The Boethian version of ancient music theory became part of Medieval education, while the Medieval modal system appropriated the relevant Greek nomenclature and classificatory logic. From the Renaissance onwards, there was a surge in attempts to harness Greek musical lore so as to rebalance poetic word and musical sound, to revive the ancient melodic notation and tonal system, to compose new music in ancient Greek style, or to otherwise influence the musical developments of the time. Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonist endeavor to revitalize ancient singing for therapeutic purposes is perhaps the most striking expression of what is rightly viewed as the Renaissance ambition to make a practical, performable technē out of an abstract epistēmē.[1] In the author’s view, these attempts “remained an antiquarian curiosity or were only a vague inspiration for the composers of the period” (p. 41). However, similar attempts by the Florentine Camerata to revive Greek drama in its unity of word, music and action—even if ancient performative practices were in reality misunderstood—led to nothing less than the invention of the opera and its characteristic recitative style of singing as the hallmark of modern musical culture. More generally speaking, the opera could have been given somewhat greater emphasis in the book.
At the end of Chapter 2, the author turns to the appropriation of ancient theories of cosmic music and musical harmony as models for understanding the universe by physicists like Kepler and Newton down to the contemporary researchers of gravitational waves, by early modern occult philosophers like Robert Fludd, and by early Christian theologians like Clement of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo. This illuminating discussion makes clear that modern encounters with ancient thinking about music not only served musical or music-theoretical objectives, but also pertained to more basic, foundational ideas, notably the scientific paradigm that formed the backbone of modernity.
In Chapter 3 (“Aesthetic Issues”) the focus shifts to views on the perception and appreciation of music. Ancient sources including Plato, Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Philodemus, Aristides Quintilianus and Claudius Ptolemy as well as terms like aisthēsis, ēthos, pathos, homoiotēs, sumphōnia, euruthmia and summetria are discussed. Modern musical aesthetics and more recent trends in neuroaesthetics and psychoacoustics are set against the background of the ancient discourse on the sensory approach to music, on how music is judged, and on the mimetic power of sound. A section on “Music and emotions” is a welcome contribution to the currently booming research on ancient emotions, in which auditory practices have been rather neglected so far. A thorough analysis of mimēsis and to kalon as concepts related to music shows how ancient Greek sources can be read as fresh contributions to old debates—in this case to the debate over meaning and aesthetic value in music, where there are still widely varying opinions on how this question should even be approached.[2]
Chapter 4 (“Occurrences and Recurrences”) explores polarities such as tradition and innovation, classical and popular, masculine and feminine, or native and foreign. These polarities were significant in Greek musical discourse and attracted broader audiences than most of the specialized issues discussed in previous chapters. Similar debates continue to captivate large audiences and influence cultural trends, making this thematic area an ideal arena for pursuing the “central aim” of the book series “to show how antiquity is relevant to life today” (p. ii, my emphasis). To be sure, the book does provide an up-to-date overview of internet resources on ancient Greek music in the “Suggestions for Further Reading” section, and the “Bibliography” is fairly complete up to 2022. However, contemporary cultural phenomena are otherwise not discussed.
For instance, consider the debate over old versus new music in Aristophanes, Pherecrates, and Plato, which is aptly discussed by the author. The tendency to blame, demonize, and even ban new genres of music for purportedly corrupting the youth has escalated in recent decades,[3] offering a wealth of contemporary analogs to the ancient disputes, potentially more relatable to today’s students than the moral panic surrounding rock and roll in the mid-1950s (p. 86). Or the discussion of music as a marker of ethnic and gender identities: this discussion could certainly benefit from references to postmodern theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, who saw music as a powerful means of social distinction. (The same discussion could also benefit from references to pre-Classical sources like Homer or Archilochus, who might reflect changing attitudes towards the social value of music in the formative years of the Greek polis.)[4]
While it is understandable why a book aimed at general readers employs the designation ‘modern’ in the common sense of encompassing the recent centuries and decades leading up to the present, a closer examination of contemporary globalized postmodernity, distinguishing it from the Euro-American modernity of the recent past, could greatly enhance the book’s argument about the relevance of ancient music today. Numerous phenomena could be interrogated from this perspective: How is ancient Greek music appropriated in the contemporary digitized and internet-dominated music scene? How about the emergence of new ethnic music genres, such as ‘ancient world music,’[5] which claim to be inspired by, if not reviving, ancient Greek music? Furthermore, how does the recent expansion of scholarly and artistic focus to include a broader spectrum of auditory phenomena—such as noise, environmental sounds, and silence—affect ancient music studies?[6] These topics represent just a few of the areas being developed in contemporary research on ancient music.
A final short chapter (“Conclusions: Looking Ahead”) explicitly poses the question “But can the ideas and practices of ancient mousikē still have a role in the contemporary world, decontextualized from their historical setting?” Again, the answer is not a discussion of the current state and the potential of appropriating ancient Greek auditory culture in the contemporary world but an—undeniably valuable—overview of recent developments in archaeomusicological research.
Despite its lack of focus on distinctly contemporary cultural phenomena, the book provides, as mentioned earlier, a first-class cultural-historical introduction to ancient Greek mousikē as well as a valuable guide to its post-antique influence, particularly in Europe from 1500 to 1930 AD. After engaging with this book, readers will likely be eager to delve deeper into the subject matter. For this purpose, a recent Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music (Hoboken 2020, BMCR 2021.07.07), co-edited by Tosca A. C. Lynch and Eleonora Rocconi, is highly recommended.
Notes
[1] See also Nejc Sukljan, “Renaissance Music between Science and Art: The Case of Gioseffo Zarlino”, Musicological Annual 56, 2020, 183-206.
[2] E.g., Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert, “Music and Meaning”, in: Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael H. Thaut (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, 2nd edn (Oxford 2016) 33–46.
[3] E.g., Jon Savage, “Demonising those teenage dirtbags: The current moral outcry over drill music is so last century. Adults have been scared about what the kids are singing for decades”, Index on Censorship 47:2 (2018) 66-69; August Brown, “California congressional candidate slams Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’”, Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2020.
[4] E.g., Manolis Mikrakis, “Pots, Early Iron Age Athenian Society and the Near East: The Evidence of the Rattle Group”, in: Vicky Vlachou (ed.), Pots, Workshops and Early Iron Age Society: Function and Role of Ceramics in Early Greece (Brussels 2015, BMCR 2016.12.16) 277–289, esp. 283, 286.
[5] See, for example, the YouTube channel SEIKILO Ancient World Music.
[6] For some latest studies of sounds other than strictly musical in ancient Greece, see Erica Angliker and Angela Bellia (edd.), Soundscape and landscape at Panhellenic Greek sanctuaries, Telestes: collana di studi e ricerchi di archeologi musical nel medirerraneo 6 (Pisa and Rome 2021), BMCR 2022.11.35; Jill Gordon (ed.), Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece (Bloomington, Indiana 2022). For the ‘sonic turn’, see Tom McEnaney, “The Sonic Turn”, Diacritics 47 (2020) 109–180.