The witty observation variously attributed to a number of twentieth-century songwriters and performers that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ identifies a situation that might well be considered by musicians to involve a kind of logical ‘category error’. What is the point of writing about something people actually want to hear, and how can writing about music be expected to illuminate the way in which listeners are affected in practice by musical sounds? In the case of ancient Greek music, almost all that we know of it comes from theoretical writings, and the virtually complete absence of sonic referents, for example notated music and performable scores, exacerbates the scenario (though for some, no doubt, it alleviates it by allowing them to suppose that solely textual rather than practical explorations of ancient music are required). Not only can we not be certain how the melodies and intricate rhythms, which are derivable to some extent from metre, would have sounded in practice, but even if it were possible to recreate the sound of the music for performance, we could not hear it through the ears – that is, with the intimate and culturally determined understanding and appreciation – of those by whom it would have been heard in antiquity.
Those who want to think about these matters, however, have the enormous benefit, in the case of ancient Greek music, of the two earliest extended treatments of the subject by two great fourth-century authors, Plato and Aristoxenus. Yet, as G. points out at the start of his impressive and wide-ranging discussion, it is immediately apparent that these two authors embark on the subject from very different premises. Plato's longest discussion in the Republic (other dialogues such as Timaeus and Philebus offer briefer remarks) famously revolves around the notion of ethos: for Plato (and perhaps Socrates) music – or rather mousikê, which crucially involves far more than purely musical sounds, embracing words, dance and more – is primarily a vehicle for the imitation and communication of moral and ethical qualities. As such, music must be regulated in an ideal state to ensure that the harmonious soul and society are not damaged by the kind of sounds that in Plato's view would tend to produce the wrong kind of character. In marked contrast, the object of Aristoxenus’ more down-to-earth analyses is what for him was a traditional, familiar and living body of sound, which he seeks to subject to detailed technical examination and exposition. It is as if readers two millennia hence were to be asked to reconstruct a sense of how today's classical music was perceived and understood from nothing but an essay on musical aesthetics by the philosopher Roger Scruton, in tandem with a detailed analytical exegesis proposed by the music theorist Heinrich Schenker. It would give them no idea why audiences feel so inspired by Bach's Matthew Passion or so moved by the slow movement of Mozart's 21st piano concerto.
The outcome for ancient Greek musical studies is that those interested in thinking about what kind of thing music is in general will look to Plato's treatment for illumination; whereas those who want to know about the specific technical structures of ancient Greek music will turn to Aristoxenus (and, given his incomplete surviving oeuvre, to later antique authors such as Aristides Quintilianus and the Pseudo-Plutarchan author of a treatise On Music, who drew on his work in their writings). In focusing on each of these two very different approaches within a single book, G. presents them as distinct and parallel investigations, albeit that they have occasional points of contact. He begins, however, by pertinently noting that the very object of discussion, ‘music’, is something that authors and readers recognise to be a set of particular, habitual and culturally specific practices; and he proceeds to provide a useful and admirably clear sketch of the standard theory of ancient scales derived from Aristoxenus and Aristides. While this theoretical underpinning indicates something of how the melodic and harmonic structures to which ancient thinkers about music refer may have been understood, it is not clear whether these had much bearing in practice on their perception of music, the effects of which will have depended on a host of circumstances and performance practices.
The essays that follow examine with great care and expertise the theoretical accounts of Plato and Aristoxenus. G.'s judicious explanations are presented with style and sophistication, though these qualities do not always make for easy comprehension. The expression of many of his sentences means that they need to be read more than once before they yield sense; to take a random example, one learns that, in the case of Plato's writings, ‘it becomes clear that following the course of an argument in order to realize a self-sustaining cognitive moment is just as important as the texts’ propositional content’ (p. 38). The discussions of the two ancient authors feel, moreover, somewhat detached from each other. As G. himself admits, ‘the two corpora [of Plato and Aristoxenus] are incommensurable’ (p. 5); and his attempt to pull together in his conclusion some of the inevitable commonalities seems to be something of a concession to creating a unifying thesis rather than a reflection of the nature of the material.
One of the principal insights that the book seeks to demonstrate is that, unlike Aristoxenus, Plato is not so much interested in music per se as in using the Socratic examination of music to further his own philosophical arguments. As G. proposes (p. 6), ‘we could characterise his texts as control mechanisms intended to induce the soul to move in better, calmer ways which have both epistemological and metaphysical consequences, while in Aristoxenus music is a sensual comportment, brought about through generations of practice and resident as a set of axioms and rules in the ears of the musically acculturated’. What in the end may unite the two theoretical approaches, if only tangentially, is that individually and jointly they comprise the beginnings of what we may recognise as elements of auditory culture, of the interchange between music as conceived as an organised body of sound and its power to affect listeners deeply on an aesthetic and emotional level. In view of the way musical styles in today's globalised world seem to be tending towards harmonic and rhythmical homogeneity, it is perhaps reassuring that the origins of music theory in such a remote world of sound and feeling as that of Plato and Aristoxenus can continue to engender productive avenues for approaching auditory culture, whether ancient or modern. While we may never be able hear the music that they heard, at least their writings survive as a rich guide to the architecture of that music and the possible contours of its perception. That is surely something to dance about.
