Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought

Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamorphosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with 'contemporary' debates – contemporary with debates in the Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.

Introduction; 1. Forest: on surrounds; 2. Ringdove: on the uncanny power of performance; 3. Cicadas: on the voice; 4. Echo: on listening; 5. Reeds: on musical objects; 6. Nightingale: on expression; 7. Beetle: on rhythm.

Pauline A. LeVen is an Associate Professor of Classics at Yale University, Connecticut. She is the author of The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry (Cambridge, 2014), which received the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Yale College Prize for outstanding publication. She is also co-editor, with Sean Gurd, of the first volume of A Cultural History of Western Music (forthcoming) and currently at work on two monographs – one entitled Poetry and the Posthuman, the other devoted to music and mortality. A member of MOISA (the Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage), she has taken an active role in promoting and disseminating the study of ancient Greek and Roman musical culture.