Singing with the Muses: new paths into ancient Mousikē
Keywords:
Ancient Greek Music, Greek musical documents, Louvre aulos, 3D modelling, Digital Humanities.Abstract
This article offers an overview of a variety of paths that can be followed to investigate the rich and multifaceted world of the ancient 'art of the muses', highlighting the value that different perspectives bring to the study of ancient mousikē and its development as a discipline. In other words, this article is a methodological piece in the etymological sense of the term. It is a written logos that illustrates different methodoi—a number of 'paths' (hodoi) that lead us through (meth') the world of ancient greek music and reveal different, but complementary, aspects of this complex reality. Given that the historical dimension of these important issues has been discussed elsewhere, this article explores the productive interplay of different dimensions through the lens of my own research journey. In particular, we shall see how the interplay of insights offered by ancient philosophy, literature and musical theory, combined with the practical evidence preserved by the greek musical documents and material culture, shows that we need to develop a flexible and multi-faceted approach to the study of ancient mousikē in order to try to recapture some of its defining features. The final sections of this article include a number of case studies that show how new tools developed in the area of digital humanities have great potential for the study of ancient music. Some of these materials, including modern performances of ancient musical scores as well as 3d reconstructions of ancient instruments such as the louvre aulos, are showcased on a new dedicated website, emousike.com.
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