This pioneering volume that originated in a workshop and conference at Oxford brings together the work of several experts ‘to make connections between musicological scholarship and the issues that have traditionally concerned students of ancient literature’ (p. 2). Given the burgeoning field of sound studies and increasing interest in auditory culture in ancient Greece, these ten essays make a timely intervention, ‘uncoupling’ music from mousikē to focus on ‘how the verbal and the musical interact’ (p. 3).
With the book falling into two major sections, the first five essays address the formal musical features of performed poetry, such as tuning, melody and rhythm. The others turn to the role of music in philosophical and literary critical traditions. Phillips provides a clear, engaging introduction situating the papers in relation to one another as ‘a series of interpretive gestures’ (p. 13). The ‘intermediality’ of this musical-textual exchange is very much circumscribed by the textual. The authors focus on musicality embedded in texts and operate from a textualist paradigm of making music signify. More attention to music's sonic materialism – to what music brings to the meaning-making process of performance (e.g. C. Cox, Journal of Visual Culture 10 [2011], 145–61) – would further deepen and enrich the volume's insights. Along these lines, a few papers would have benefited from closer engagement with the culturally conditioned sources of music (voice, lyre, aulos). But this criticism does not detract from the achievement of this commendably coherent and thought-provoking volume that makes recent work in ancient Greek music more widely accessible to anyone with an interest in ancient Greek literature and culture.
J.C. Franklin's richly suggestive piece fittingly opens the collection with a ‘stopgap’ paper from decades of ongoing research on Greek tonal history. Franklin's work addresses diatonic/heptatonic tuning: the arrangement of the seven strings of the lyre by tuning string pairs to resonant/consonant fifths (3:2) and fourths (4:3). While underscoring that such a tuning cycle is naturally derived from distinctive auditory phenomena, Franklin reveals parallels between Greek sources on this tuning system and Mesopotamian texts from 1,500 years prior. These two sources share striking similarities in nomenclature and tuning practice, suggesting that diatonic tuning centres on the lyre's middle string in what Franklin calls an ‘epicentric tonality’. After a historical sketch pointing to contact between these musical cultures in the Late Bronze Age and again in the Archaic Period, Franklin illustrates this epicentric tonality in early lyric poetry through a ‘recomposition’ of Sappho 1.
D'Angour explores three key texts spanning 1,000 years to show how musical expression can contribute to the text's significance and effect in performance. Applying the melodisation principles suggested by M.L. West and S. Hagel to Homeric epic, D'Angour identifies instances of ‘significant melodization’ in the beginning of the Iliad and the Odyssey, modelling how melodic contour can factor into the practice of close reading. D'Angour then turns to the musical notation of Euripides’ Orestes to show how melodic annotations that disregard pitch accent create patterns that underscore affective themes between strophe and antistrophe and even create imitative interplay between melody and meaning. While I have reservations about assuming that the strophe's text was set prior to the antistrophe's and thus primarily motivated the pair's melody, I found D'Angour's reading convincing. He ends by discussing the melodic subtleties of the second-century ce song inscribed on the ‘Seikilos stele’.
Phillips takes up the relationship between rhythm and meaning in Pindar's dactylo-epitrites. With reference to ancient views on rhythm and its distinctness from metre, Phillips considers examples where the sounding of a word through its rhythmical structure seems to interact with its semantic meaning. Echoing recent sound theorists (e.g. D.A. Kapchan [ed.], Theorizing Sound Writing [2017]), Phillips questions the act of writing and its potential to misrepresent the effect of such sensory interactions. But Phillips then actualises this in his own writing by limiting sound and sense interactions to their ‘subtlety and fleetingness’ as though strictly on a page, while casting their ‘mediation by music and dance’ as ‘additional affectivity’ (p. 87). Phillips thus repeatedly tries to make sound behave by the signifying structures of language, even though the interactions he presents are striking examples where sound acts upon the subject in affective ways that language alone cannot. In his compelling reading of Pythian 1, rhythm links choral movement with the unfolding of the poem's imagery.
O. Thomas discusses the possibility of melodic innovation in Euripides’ Medea. He begins with two passages from Athenaeus’ second-century ce work which draws on a riddle from Clearchus’ On Brainteasers, linking a tragedy by Callias to the melodies of Medea. Thomas focuses on the riddle's suggestion that Medea was the first tragedy to use melodic responsion after Callias’ Lettered Tragedy. Thomas then turns to what he calls the ‘musical discourse’ in the Medea’s text to validate his interpretation of Clearchus’ riddle. His discussion primarily identifies an ironised ‘content-based revolution in music’ in the first stasimon (p. 114), with the interesting but inconclusive possibility of what innovation in melodic responsion ‘could’ add, leaving this reader unconvinced of any secure link between the specific musical themes he adduces and the truly ‘slippery testimonium in Athenaeus’ (p. 118).
Consolidating the papers on how music interacts with words, S. Psaroudakes provides a vivid examination of such interactions in the Hymn to the Sun, one of three surviving annotated songs by Mesomedes of Crete, a freed slave who became an eminent composer under the emperor Hadrian. Psaroudakes provides a clear analysis of the song's melodic and rhythmic structure: the hymn's Doric language is melodised in diatonic Lydian and has a distinct tonal centre on hypatē mesōn (C), the note that occurs most frequently, including the song's beginning and end. Psaroudakes outlines the mimetic effects in the melody's structure, such as the slow tonal rise across the first five lines describing the rising of the sun. As Psaroudakes concludes, echoing D'Angour's discussion, ‘The mimetic aspects of melos in this composition are broadly similar to those at work in the “Seikilos song” and, more distantly, in the chorus of Euripides’ Orestes’ (p. 130).
Turning to music's broader context, N. Weiss's engaging piece moves beyond the formal musicality of texts to the audience's perception of the aulos that accompanied dramatic performances. Specifically, she considers how in late Euripides especially references to the syrinx (panpipes) in aulos-accompanied language could invite the audience to imagine syrinx-sound in the perceived auletic sound. Her discussion of the Electra is especially compelling, where syrinx performance in the strophe corresponds directly with lōtos-aulos performance in the antistrophe. But the remaining examples do not formally correspond to this degree. It would be helpful to qualify further the extent of the effect. Since the open-tubed syrinx is far simpler than the reed-mouthpiece aulos, it seems unlikely that such effects would extend much beyond the discrete reference. Weiss also attributes an ‘ominous’ or ‘dangerous’ character to the aulos, but this affective quality is read into its sound based upon her reading of the text's plot rather than any inherent quality in the aulos itself.
Writing on the sonic environment of melic (‘sung’) poetry, A.-E. Peponi addresses music's capacity to efface semantic meaning. Peponi frames her discussion with ‘an Athenian depiction of an imaginary Sappho’ that characterises Sappho's melic poetry as ‘ethereal words’ (ἠερίων ἐπέων, p. 166). Peponi suggests that melic poetry has a certain texture that is sensed in a material way – a hazy atmosphere in which ‘the concreteness of words is made to (or thought to) evaporate’ (p. 168). Turning to Plato's discussion of lexis, she attributes this effacing atmosphere to poetry's rhythm and melody. She then examines this language/music equilibrium in three dialogues. Her otherwise engaging readings elide distinctions in vocal and instrumental sound, which are important for Plato and have bearing on the argument. The dissolving, liquid auletic sound in Republic 3 and the instrumental solos in Laws are different from the explicitly melic atmosphere that carries poetry in ‘streams’ (νάματα) from an inspired source in Phaedrus.
P. Destrée considers the role of music in Aristotle's theorising in the Politics, specifically what Aristotle means by ‘music for pursuit in leisure’. This question bears on a key distinction he sees between Plato and Aristotle on musical education: while Plato would have citizens continually practise music to develop virtue, Aristotle would limit performance to childhood, since only music pursued in leisure as opposed to utility is fully valued for its own sake. Childhood performance experience enables free citizens to become judges of music at leisure, judging not only music's morality, but its practice in performance. Destrée then considers which kind of music such citizens would judge at leisure, positing music in the Dorian and Hyperdorian modes and possibly some in Lydian. Reflecting on Aristotle's rejection of the aulos as not promoting intelligence, Destrée concludes by comparing the leisured ‘music for intelligence’ to figural drawing as a lifelong activity promoting contemplation of beautiful and thus orderly forms.
J.I. Porter brings us to literary criticism, providing a historical and conceptual account of euphonism. His essay treats the musicality and rhythmics of language from the perspective of ‘unheard sounds’, the ‘gaps’ of silence that structure language's physical sound and paradoxically contribute to the experience of the sublime. Porter first asserts that Cicero's ideal orator is philosophically Platonic but aesthetically closer to Longinus, since this ideal orator ‘shines forth’ at times in certain speakers. For Cicero and Longinus sublimity is ‘never seen but only glimpsed’ (p. 206). Porter then draws connections between Cicero and the euphonist critics (kritikoi), for whom the ear – not the mind – is the judge of meaning. For Cicero and the kritikoi, Porter argues, euphonism is thus not grounded in nature, but in custom, habit and art. Situating this euphonist position in terms of Plato's thought, Porter concludes with a thought-provoking reading of sound as ‘an arrangement of silent gaps’.
Finally, A. Barker writes on an episode from Plutarch's Table Talk featuring a rowdy scene of aulos performance followed by a philosophical discussion. Barker notes intertexts with Plato's Symposium and other dialogues in the performance scene, as an aulete ‘indulges licentious tastes’ with ‘intoxicating’ music (p. 235). He then examines the scene's shift to the world of the Lyceum in Callistratus’ speech on how visible and audible phenomena are perceived by both humans and animals. Barker does not really address the bias against the aulos in the passage but reads it on its own terms and with the intertexts it evokes. A final section considers the possible ‘intermediality’ between the ‘virtual audition’ of dramatically described performance and the philosophical argument that follows.
The volume is rounded off with a bibliography and useful index. The book is generally well produced, though I found a few misprints, such as: ‘that’ for ‘than’, p. 78; ‘The first the’, p. 82; ‘ealier’, p. 197; missing ‘at’, p. 203; ce for bce, p. 217; Wilson's ‘Music’ dates to (2005), not (2008), p. 275.
