eBook

Music, text, and culture in ancient Greece

Phillips, Tom, D'Angour, Armand

2018

Overview

This book explores the interaction between music and poetry in ancient Greece. Although scholars have long recognized the importance of music to ancient performance culture, little has been written on the specific effects that musical accompaniment and features such as rhythmical structure and melody would have created in individual poems. The chapters in the first half of the volume engage closely with the evidential and interpretative challenges that this issue poses, and propose original readings of a range of texts, including Homer, Pindar, and Euripides, as well as later poets such as Seikilos and Mesomedes. While they emphasize different formal features, they argue collectively for a two-way relationship between music and language. Attention to the musical features of poetic texts, insofar as we can reconstruct them, enables us to better understand not only their effects on audiences, but also the various ways in which they project and structure meaning. In part two, the focus shifts to ancient attempts to conceptualize interractions between words and music; the essays in this section analyse the contested place that music occupied in Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and other critical writers of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Thinking about music is shown to influence other domains of intellectual life, such as literary criticism, and to be vitally informed by ethical concerns.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Classical Literature / Classical Poetry / Greece-History-To 146 B.C / Greek poetry / Greek poetry -- History and criticism / Music / Music -- Greece -- History -- To 1500
• ISBN: 0198794460, 9780198794462