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
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
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
Cara Nicol (Jesus College, University of Oxford)
Extramusicality in the Surviving Melodic Fragments
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (Stanford University)
A Figurine in the British Museum: Questions and Thoughts
Song, Voice, and the Ancient Stage
Week 6 | 17th November
Maggie Tighe (Christ Church College, University of Oxford)
Naomi Weiss (Harvard University)
Intertheatricality in Euripides' Orestes: The Phrygian's Song
Composition and Music Education in the Ancient World
Week 7
Saturday 22nd November, 2-4 pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
The Call of Kinnaru: Musical Performance
John Franklin (lyre), Abigail Bradford (aulos), and Rachel Fikes (voice)
Monday 24th November
John Franklin (University of Vermont)
Composing and Rehearsing with the Lyre
Abigail Bradford (University of Virginia)
Making a Mousikos Aner: Greek Vases, Musical Education, and the Paradox of Citizenship in 5th c. Athens
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.
