Mousikē Technē: The Art of the Muses in Thought, Word, Sound, and Stage
AMO Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term 2025
Mondays 2-4pm Christ Church College, Research Centre
On Zoom at
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85262561701?pwd=UwkdFD4pQUlDKCCL8h5JG2bV5HEGNh.1
Meeting ID: 852 6256 1701
Passcode: 046053
Please find past talks on our YouTube.
What is Mousikē Technē
Week 1 | 13th October
Introduction by AMO
This brief talk given by members of Ancient Music at Oxford serves as an overview of the subject and an introduction to the seminar series.
Armand D'Angour (Jesus College, University of Oxford)
Dancing to Metre: The Movements of the Chorus
This paper will consider what we can learn about the elusive matter of ancient Greek dance from the indications of metre. While some choral movements are easily mapped onto metrical forms such as marching metres, most lyric metres are bafflingly complex and it is not easy to imagine a close correlation with movements of feet or bodies. Scant but important evidence exists on papyrus (ictus marks), which may help to elucidate the knotty problem of how choruses moved when singing complex metres.
Philosophy and Perception
Week 2 | 20th October
Annabel Rockett (New College, University of Oxford)
The Siren's Song: Plato on the Failure of Music Without Philosophy
This paper explores Plato’s persistent anxiety about music that forgets its philosophical purpose. In the Republic, Symposium, and Laws, he presents mousikē as a practice capable of both forming and deforming the soul. When music’s power to delight is detached from the discipline of reason, it slips into imitation and seduction rather than instruction. The aulos—admired for its expressive range yet condemned for its excess—embodies this tension between pleasure and order. For Plato, the failure of music without philosophy lies not in its sound but in its moral direction: pleasure severed from truth. Yet in the Symposium, Alcibiades’ likening of Socrates to Marsyas suggests a kind of reconciliation, where philosophical speech reclaims the force of musical enchantment and turns pleasure toward understanding. Tracing this movement from charm to insight, the paper reconsiders Plato’s theory of mousikē as a meditation on how aesthetic experience might sustain, rather than subvert, the pursuit of wisdom.
Eleonora Rocconi (University of Pavia)
Musical Harmonia in Plato's Thought: Psychology, Cosmology, and Musical Practice
In the Greek world, the concept of harmonia is central to philosophical, aesthetic and medical thought, but it finds its most privileged expression in the field of music. Musical harmonia is often described as a particularly significant example of the structured order of nature and the cosmos, in which different elements are connected by a unifying principle. The great power of music over the soul derives exactly from its effectiveness in moving, modifying and harmonising human emotions. Plato, better than anyone else, summarised and described the mechanisms of musical therapy for emotions based on the concept of harmonia, but he also attributed additional meanings to it that become progressively more important, even within the same dialogue (e.g. in the Republic).
In my paper, I will first illustrate the original meaning of the term harmonia and its earliest musical connotations in ancient Greek sources, commenting on both its technical meaning and its analogical adaptability in non-musical contexts. This will allow me to make some observations on Plato’s reworking of the notion of harmonia, which greatly influenced its reception, and on its relationship with the cultural milieu of the time and earlier periods.
Language (Pitch Accent and Metre)
Week 3 | 27th October
Thyra-Lilja Altunin (Brasenose College, University of Oxford)
From Text to Music: Linguistic Building Blocks of Ancient Greek Poetic Music
Ancient Greek poems were not merely written texts but compositions meant to be sung, reflecting the deep integration of language and music in Greek culture. By combining linguistic, philological, and musicological analysis, this paper explores how the prosodic features of ancient Greek—its natural pitch patterns and accentuation—provided the foundation for the musical melodies that accompanied poetic texts, revealing how mousikē technē emerged from the interplay of word, rhythm, and melody.
The art of song combines two melodies: the musical melody and the melody of speech—the natural pitch patterns inherent in language. Studies of modern pitch-accented and tonal languages show that musical melodies in song often closely follow the speech melody, which, together with the analysis of surviving ancient Greek musical fragments, suggests that this relationship was also central to ancient Greek composition. This allows for the possibility of reconstructing the melodic patterns/contours of the ancient Greek language from the accentuation markings in the words of the poetry.
In taking the step of composing a musical melody to accompany ancient Greek poetic verses, it seems that ancient composers not only followed the linguistic accents but also expanded upon them through compositional practices—adding musical intervals, modifying melodic direction, and shaping broader melodic designs. This study thus highlights how the interplay of linguistic accent, rhythm, and melodic design shaped the expressive power of ancient Greek song, offering a window into the artistry of its composers.
Alejandro Abritta (University of Buenos Aires)
Rhythm, Metre, and Music in Ancient Greek Poetry: The Little We Know
The aim of my presentation is to explore the intricate relationships that connect the metre of Greek poetry, the rhythm of the language, and the tonal accent of ancient Greek. While I will address several specific phenomena, in particular in the Homeric hexameter and the Sapphic Stanza, the central motivation of this discussion is to illuminate the difficulties and limitations inherent in this line of research, in order to demonstrate both its feasibility and the methodological tools required for its advancement.
NO SEMINAR WEEK 4
Week 4 | 4th November
Melody and Mimetics
Week 5 | 10th November 3-5pm
Cara Nicol (Jesus College, University of Oxford)
Extramusicality in the Surviving Melodic Fragments
Ancient Greek, unlike the spoken modern language, employs an accentual system of pitch rather than stress. The relationship between this spoken pitch accent and the melodic contour of surviving ancient musical fragments has long been acknowledged; the two conform to a close degree, with the peaks of accented words coordinating with the highest pitched note in the musical word. Nonetheless, nonconformities, where this rule is broken, appear frequently throughout the extant musical fragments.
While pitch accentual conformity is a crucial compositional device, the musical innovations of the surviving written musical fragments instead rely on systematically violating this musical practice in order to celebrate the text according to an established paradigm. This is well documented as a pattern for musical development, one which was employed by Renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi. His musical innovation relied on word painting, a common musical technique wherein a composer uses melodic devices to auditorily depict or represent events or concepts that are woven into the text of a sung lyric piece. While the term word painting is not one that can be found in classical Greek, the meaning is closely akin to the concept of mimesis, (μίμησις), banned by Plato because of its ill philosophical effects.
This paper therefore applies the musical theories present in the Renaissance music of Claudio Monteverdi to classical antiquity, understood through the surviving melodic fragments and the writings of Plato. Highlighting the arguments that surrounded word painting in well-documented musical time periods allows for a musicological reflection on earlier understandings of music and on compositions based on theories and aesthetics that are less well understood and documented.
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (Stanford University)
Girl in Motion: Questions and Thoughts about a Figurine in the British Museum
How can a contemporary viewer interpret the depiction of bodily movement in ancient artifacts, especially when context is totally missing ? In this presentation I would like to share my exploration of this broader question by focusing on a Laconian figurine. Whether or not the delicately crafted posture of this girl in motion could be interpreted as dance is the main question I hope to discuss. As we will see, however, this question raises all sorts of issues that pertain to the way cultures devise and establish their taxonomies, including the Greek taxonomies in the realm of mousikê.
Song, Voice, and the Ancient Stage
Week 6 | 17th November
Maggie Tighe (Christ Church College, University of Oxford)
A Veiled Divinity: The New Lyrics of Euripides’ Fragmentary Ino
Until quite recently, our knowledge of Euripides’ Ino was restricted to a mere twenty-five quotations preserved by later authors. Although these fragments were invaluable, they offered little sense of its dramatic structure, characterisation, or tone.
The past fifteen years, however, have transformed this picture through two remarkable discoveries. In 2012, the publication of P. Oxy. 5131 (ed. Luppe & Henry) revealed a brief but continuous passage, granting us our first tangible glimpse into the action of Ino itself. More recently, in 2024 a further papyrus, P. Phil. Nec. 23 (ed. Gehad, Gibert & Trnka-Amrhein), was published, preserving approximately fifty lines each of Ino and Polyidus, another fragmentary Euripidean tragedy. This papyrus provides what appears to be short groupings of lines from various points in the tragedy.
Taken together, these finds have significantly expanded the material available for study. Beyond shedding new light on the plot and dramatic context of Ino, they crucially include our first surviving lyric passages, allowing us to tentatively begin to examine how Euripides may have treated song within this tragedy. The aim of this paper is to explore these newly recovered lyric lines and to consider how they might contribute to our understanding of Euripides’ treatment of song in Ino.
Naomi Weiss (Harvard University)
Intertheatricality in Euripides' Orestes: The Phrygian's Song
This paper uses the Phrygian’s song in Euripides’ Orestes as a case study for a new approach to intertextuality and repetition in Greek tragedy. Previous scholarship on this extraordinary monody—the longest in surviving classical drama—has tended to focus on four intersecting areas: the song as an example of the “New Music”; the song’s connection with Timotheus’ Persians; the singer’s foreignness; and the song’s hybridity as a lyric version of a messenger speech. In all these respects, the monody tends to be treated as something of an aberration, extracted from the play and having meaning primarily through its newness and foreignness. I take a more holistic approach to demonstrate how a significant part of the monody’s innovation lies in its intricate relationship both to multiple other theatrical performances and to its immediate dramatic context. It comes, I argue, as the climax of a pattern of reduplication that is one of the hallmarks of Orestes. We can see this in terms of both intertheatricality, a performance-based model I borrow from Theater Studies, and what I call intratheatricality. The song looks backwards and forwards, incorporating and anticipating a dizzying number of other performances from the rest of this tragedy and from other plays, as well as various forms of performance beyond drama. When we take account of all that it encompasses and makes present onstage, we see how far the Phrygian’s song exceeds any easy categorization. We can also then consider how far it might be understood not so much as a melodramatic outlier but as decidedly, even overdeterminedly tragic.
Composition and Music Education in the Ancient World
Week 7
Saturday 22nd November, 2-4 pm
Seminar Room 00.63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
The Call of Kinnaru: New Ancient Music for Euripides' Helen
John Franklin (lyre), Abigail Bradford (aulos), and Rachel Fickes (voice and lyre)
John Franklin is Professor of Classics at the University of Vermont. He has specialized in ancient music scholarship and performance for 30 years. The Call of Kinnaru—here with Rachel Fickes (Middlebury College) and Abigail Bradford (University of Mary Washington)—consists of voice, lyres, and double-pipe. Their repertoire includes actual notated music surviving from antiquity, and ‘new ancient music’ for songs from Euripides and Aristophanes. The latter are original compositions according to ancient principles: careful interpretation of the ancient poets’ metrical schemes and new melodies that follow the Greek pitch-accent contours according to customs observable in ancient scores, all performed on replica ancient instruments. Some of the songs are accompanied by animated ‘new ancient art’ by new Yorker cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes. The Call of Kinnaru have performed at many universities, museums, conferences, and schools in the United States, Italy, and the UK.
Click here to book your free place.
Supported by the Performance Research Hub.
Monday 24th November
John Franklin (University of Vermont)
Composing and Rehearsing with the Lyre
This paper concerns a dark corner of Greek musical culture—the backstage, pre-performance phases of dramatic music production in classical Athens. I argue that the lyre was probably commonly used for both composition and rehearsal of choral music that was ultimately destined for aulos performance. Key evidence include a revised reading of the Pronomos Vase; the tophlatothratt passage in Frogs and other lyre-strumming onomatopoeias that (I argue) are vestiges of how (hypo)didaskaloi actually communicated rhythm to choreuts and auletes; vase-paintings that indicate strumming as the most basic approach to lyre-playing; and several other text passages to contextualize and corroborate these ideas.
Abigail Bradford (University of Virginia)
Making a Mousikos Aner: Greek Vases, Musical Education, and the Paradox of Citizenship in 5th c. Athens
The phrase “mousikos aner” was used in antiquity to refer to the perfectly-educated man, one who had completed education in the paideia and mastered the three subjects of grammata, gymnasia, and mousike. Music was the connecting tissue: it connected athletics through dancing and letters through singing and recitation.
To date, thousands of Athenian vases from the 6th and 5th centuries have been discovered with images of ancient musical performance. These scenes provide vivid pictures of musicians at play in a wonderful variety of contexts, presenting a glimpse into everyday performances not always well-represented in literary sources. What does vase-painting tell us about the development of music education in Athens? Does it deviate from the contemporary literary tradition? And what does it reveal about the state of the fledgling democracy?
Metre and Modern Performance
Week 8 | 1st December
Shreya Dua (Durham University)
Alex Silverman (Jesus College, University of Oxford)
Invoking, Subverting, and Translating the Muse in Hugh Archibald Clarke's Archarnians (1886)
The University of Pennsylvania’s production of Acharnians in 1886, the first presentation of any ancient Greek comedy in North America, has been described (Pearcy 2003) as 'a pivotal point in the history of classical studies.’ Much of its success can be attributed to a remarkable score by Hugh Archibald Clarke, which is influenced both by the meter of Aristophanes’ choral odes, and by the sounds of early American popular music. This paper investigates Clarke’s setting of the invocation of the Acharnian Muse in the parabasis - a memorable moment in any production of Acharnians, as the chorus shed their clothes and become distracted from their song by thoughts of supper. Clarke adapts the ode’s distinctive creto-paeonic meter to create an accessible waltz-ballad: it is a deft act of musical translation which spans the distance between the musicality of the ancient source and the prevailing tastes of a modern audience, and provides a valuable model for the interpretation of meter in performance.
