Chapter 5
Music and Dance in Greece and Rome
Eleonora Rocconi,
Eleonora Rocconi
Search for more papers by this authorEleonora Rocconi,
Eleonora Rocconi
Search for more papers by this authorBook Editor(s):Pierre Destrée,
Penelope Murray,
Pierre Destrée
Search for more papers by this authorPenelope Murray
Search for more papers by this authorSummary
In antiquity, the art of mousikē embraced the entire field of poetic performance to which the Muses gave their name, including music, poetry, and dance. Both vocal and instrumental music were conceived as mimetic arts, having a more or less (according to the genre) explicit narrative and representative content, highly developed in theatrical genres, where the dramatic flow was easily combined with the musical structure.
In Archaic and Classical Greece, music performances (regarded as the most effective means to arouse deep emotions in the audience) were mainly used to convey and reinforce the values shared by the community. The increasing emergence of soloists and professional performers, however, gradually transformed music exhibitions into spectacular entertainment. The aesthetics typical of Hellenistic show business thus found fertile ground in Rome, where it developed on a large scale.
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Further Reading
- Scholarly publications on ancient Greek and Roman music have interestingly increased in recent years: a good introduction to the topic may be found in West (1992), Mathiesen (1999), Landels (2000), and Rocconi (2009). The most complete and up-to-date collection of extant melodies and fragments is Pöhlmann and West (2001). Theoretical texts on different scientific aspects of musical inquiry have become more widely known and read thanks to new recently available modern translations and comments: the best collection of texts is in Barker (1989), where the author translates and comments in English on all the relevant evidence on harmonic and acoustic sciences. More specific books on music theory are: Bélis (1986), Barker (2007), Hagel (2009), and Creese (2010) (on different aspects of harmonic science); Martinelli (2009) (where musical activities and philosophical reflections on music in the Hellenistic age are investigated); Pelosi (2010) (adopting an innovative approach to the study of the binomial of music and philosophy in Platonic writings); Huffmann (2011) (which collects the essays presented at the first international conference wholly devoted to the figure of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the Peripatetic author traditionally regarded as the major musical authority of the ancient world). Recent bibliography on ancient Greek and Roman music is listed and discussed at http://www.moisasociety.org/de-musicis.
