Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece

This book explores the relationship between music and language in ancient Greek poetry, arguing for a two-way relationship between the two. The first half of the book examines the challenges posed by the interaction of music and poetry, while the second half explores ancient attempts to conceptualize these interactions. The essays illustrate the importance of music for intellectual culture in ancient Greece and the ancients' concern to understand and control its effects on human behavior.

Format: Hardback
Length: 294 pages
Publication date: 29 March 2018
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The relationship between music and performance poetry has been a subject of scholarly interest for centuries, yet there has been limited research on the specific effects that musical accompaniment and melodic features had on individual poems. This volume aims to address this gap by exploring the intricate interplay between music and language in the poetry of ancient Greece.

The essays in the first half of the book engage closely with the challenges posed by the interaction of ancient music and poetry. They propose original readings of a diverse range of texts by authors such as Homer, Pindar, Euripides, and later poets such as Seikilos and Mesomedes. While these essays emphasize different formal features, they collectively argue for a two-way relationship between music and language. By paying attention to the musical aspects of poetic texts, as far as they can be reconstructed, scholars can gain a deeper understanding of the effects that these texts had on audiences and the various ways in which they projected and structured meaning.

In the second part of the book, the focus shifts to ancient attempts to conceptualize the interactions between words and music. The essays in this section analyze the contested place that music occupied in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and other critical writers of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. It is demonstrated that thinking about music influenced other domains of intellectual life, such as literary criticism, and was deeply informed by ethical concerns. These essays illustrate the importance of music for intellectual culture in ancient Greece and the ancients' abiding concern to understand the relationship between music and the human mind and soul.

In conclusion, this volume provides a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between music and performance poetry in ancient Greece. It sheds light on the ways in which musical accompaniment.

Weight: 480g
Dimension: 147 x 224 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198794462