Wiley Blackwell (2020) h/b 544pp £160.00 (ISBN 9781119275473)
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, as for us, music was a many-splendoured thing. As Sylvain Perrot reminds us in his contribution to this wonderfully comprehensive volume, as well as at formal settings such as theatres, sacrifices, processions, weddings and funerals, music could be heard everywhere from potters’ workshops to battlefields to mountainsides echoing to the sound of shepherds’ pipes. ‘There was no human activity without music.’
Like other performing art forms (including poetry and dance), which constituted mousikē or ars musica, music was presided over by divine Muses (whose mythology is discussed here by Penelope Murray), and so might contain insights into the divine order of the cosmos, a notion promulgated by Pythagoreans, explored by Plato and discussed by, among others, Andrew Baker in his thoughtful chapter on Harmonics. On a human level, too, music could be therapeutic (in her invaluable chapter, ‘Music and Medicine’, Antonietta Provenza traces theories from Pythagorean music therapy to Aristides Quintilianus and Galen), while, since the right kinds of music and dance were believed to encourage civic harmony, in classical Greece (though not in the Hellenistic or Roman periods) it constituted an important part of good education (Naomi Weiss begins her paper on Ancient Greek Choreia, which includes a stimulating discussion of the dolphin riders on the Oltos psyktēr, with Plato’s telling observation, ‘Shall we assume that the uneducated man is one who hasn’t danced in a chorus?’).
So, what was the right kind of music? Pericles’ mentor, Damon, was one of the first to link exposure to ‘proper’ rhythms or music to political harmony. Yet, as Mark Griffith (‘Between Local and Global: Music and Cultural Identity in Ancient Greece’) reminds us powerfully, there were many competing musical traditions and styles, which evolved over the centuries: in response to the Persian Wars, ‘eastern’ modes were considered effeminate and louche; revolutionary ‘New Music’, which experimented daringly with rhythm and melody and was introduced into Athens in the 5th C BC by Timotheus and Euripides (convincingly discussed here by Armand D’Angour), was considered shocking by many (who perhaps remembered Damon’s observation that ‘styles of music are never changed without bringing about alterations in the most fundamental sociopolitical institutions’); and by Hellenistic and Roman times cultural integration meant that music became more homogenised.
Despite ancient music’s ubiquity, as Maria Chiara Martinelli (‘Documenting Music’) reminds us, only around 60 musical ‘scores’ survive, albeit alongside numerous fragments of instruments (well discussed by Chrēstos Terzēs), visual representations (examined in a vital chapter by Shermany D. Bundrick), the remains of performance venues and handbooks of music theory. All of these, however, are grist to the mill, and it is one of this book’s many strengths that its 34 chapters and contributors have been so well-chosen to weave together available evidence to create such a vivid overview of the role of music in antiquity.
Divided into five main sections (‘Mythical Paradigms’, ‘Contexts and Practices’, Conceptualizing Music: Musical Theory and Thought’, ‘Music and Society: Musical Identities, Ideology, and Politics’; ‘Rediscovering Ancient Music: The Cultural Heritage of Mousikē’) it covers a wide range of subjects from acoustics, modes and musical aesthetics to music, power and propaganda in Julio-Claudian Imperial Rome and the reception of ancient music since the Middle Ages. Inevitably, different chapters will appeal to different readers, yet, while the lay person might find the more technical discussions harder to follow, the volume (with notes and bibliographies after each chapter, an appendix giving diagrams of the ancient modes as aulos and lyre tunings, and a General Index) contains much that anyone interested in not just ancient music, but the wider classical world will find both useful and stimulating. Any quibbles—that the emphasis is slightly skewed to Greek music, or that the copy editor occasionally nods badly—are minor.
At the end of their introduction, the editors write: ‘We hope that the interplay of many voices and approaches will allow readers to gain an inclusive and “polyphonic” understanding of the culture of mousikē in Greek and Roman antiquity.’ The brio with which they have orchestrated this towering composition deserves a standing ovation.
David Stuttard