Apollo's Lyre

Apollo's Lyre

Author: Thomas J. Mathiesen

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 832

ISBN-13: 9780803230798

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Ancient Greek music and music theory has fascinated scholars for centuries not only because of its intrinsic interest as a part of ancient Greek culture but also because the Greeks? grand concept of music has continued to stimulate musical imaginations to the present day. Unlike earlier treatments of the subject, Apollo?s Lyre is aimedøprincipally at the reader interested in the musical typologies, the musical instruments, and especially the historical development of music theory and its transmission through the Middle Ages. The basic method and scope of the study are set out in a preliminary chapter, followed by two chapters concentrating on the role of music in Greek society, musical typology, organology, and performance practice. The next chapters are devoted to the music theory itself, as it developed in three stages: in the treatises of Aristoxenus and the Sectio canonis; during the period of revival in the second century C.E.; and in late antiquity. Each theorist and treatise is considered separately but always within the context of the emerging traditions. The theory provides a remarkably complete and coherent system for explaining and analyzing musical phenomena, and a great deal of its conceptual framework, as well as much of its terminology, was borrowed and adapted by medieval Latin, Byzantine, and Arabic music theorists, a legacy reviewed in the final chapter. Transcriptions and analyses of some of the more complete pieces of Greek music preserved on papyrus or stone, or in manuscript, are integrated with a consideration of the musicopoetic types themselves. The book concludes with a comprehensive bibliography for the field, updating and expanding the author?s earlier Bibliography of Sources for the Study of Ancient Greek Music.


Greek and Latin Music Theory

Greek and Latin Music Theory

Author: Edward Nowacki

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1580469957

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A long-needed overview of, and guide to, the principles behind the treatises on music theory written in ancient Greece and Rome and continuing through the Middle Ages.


The Three Secular Plays of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

The Three Secular Plays of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Author: Guillermo Schmidhuber

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0813189616

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) wrote poetry, prose, and plays and is considered the greatest of Mexican women writers. She was an intellectual prodigy, reportedly mastering Latin in twenty lessons, and at sixteen she entered a convent so that she might continue her learning. One of the most influential early feminists in the New World, she answered a bishop's criticism in a letter that has become a classic defense of the education of women. She collected a private library of 4,000 volumes, but when she was told that her studies were delaying the progress of her spiritual education, she gave away her books and devoted herself to religious studies. Traditionally, scholars have attributed only one complete play to Sor Juana, but in 1989 Guillermo Schmidhuber discovered a lost play, The Second Celestina, which he proved conclusively to be Sor Juana's earliest comedia, co-authored with Agustin Salazar y Torres. Schmidhuber's critical study is the first dedicated exclusively to the secular plays and the first to confirm Sor Juana's authorship of three dramatic pieces. Combining literary history and criticism, Schmidhuber explores the life and originality of Sor Juana's dramas and helps elucidate her enigmatic genius. Though Sor Juana's work as a poet and intellectual has received increasing attention in the last decade, writing about her has rarely taken into account her role as dramatist. Schmidhuber helps correct this critical imbalance by examining Sor Juana's plays in light of dramatic theory. He finds elements of both mannerist and baroque theater in her work, sometimes both within the same play.


Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art

Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art

Author: Carolyn Laferrière

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1009315935

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In this volume, Carolyn M. Laferrière examines Athenian vase-paintings and reliefs depicting the gods most frequently shown as musicians to reconstruct how images suggest the sounds of the music the gods made. Incorporating insights from recent work in sensory studies, she applies formal analysis together with literary and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the musical culture of Athens. Laferrière shows how images suggest the sounds of the gods' music. This representational strategy, whereby sight and sound are blurred, conveys the 'unhearable' nature of their music: Because it cannot be physically heard, it falls to human imagination to provide its sounds and awaken viewers' multisensory engagement. Moreover, when situated within their likely original contexts, the objects establish a network of interaction between the viewer, the visualized music, and the landscape, all of which determined how divine music was depicted, perceived, and reciprocated. Laferrière demonstrates that participation in the gods' musical performances offered worshippers an multisensory experience of divine presence.


HEAR

HEAR

Author: Danilo Mandic

Publisher: University of Westminster Press

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 191438637X

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Hearing is an intricate modality of sensory perception. It is continuously enfolded in the surroundings in which it takes place. While passive in its disposition, hearing is integral to the movement and fluctuations of one’s environment. At all times, hearing remains open, (in)active but attuned to the present and continuously immersed in the murmur of its background. A delicate perception that is always situated but fundamentally overarching and extended into the open. Hearing is an immanent modality of being in and with the world. Beyond the capacity of sensory perception, hearing is also the ultimate juridical act, a sense-making activity that adjudicates and informs the spatio-temporal acoustics of justice. This penultimate volume of ‘Law and the Senses’ gathers contributions from across different disciplines working on the relationship between law and hearing, the human vocalisations and non-human echolocations, the spatial and temporal conditions in which hearing takes place, as well as the forms of order and control that listening entails. Through notions and practices of improvisation and noise, attunement and audibility sonic spatiality and urban sonicity they explore, challenge and expand the structural and sensorial qualities of law. Moreover, they recognise how hearing directs us to perceiving and understanding the intrinsic acoustic sphere of simultaneous relations, which challenge and break the normative distinctions that law informs and maintains. In an attempt to hear the ambiguous, indefinable and unembodied nature of hearing, as well as its objects – sound and silence – this volume approaches hearing as both an ontological and epistemological device to think with and about law.


The Critical Nexus

The Critical Nexus

Author: Charles M. Atkinson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-12-19

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199722382

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The Critical Nexus confronts an important and vexing enigma of early writings on music: why chant, which was understood to be divinely inspired, needed to be altered in order to work within the then-operative modal system. To unravel this mystery, Charles Atkinson creates a broad framework that moves from Greek harmonic theory to the various stages in the transmission of Roman chant, citing numerous music treatises from the sixth to the twelfth century. Out of this examination emerges the central point behind the problem: the tone-system advocated by writers coming from the Greek harmonic tradition was not suited to the notation of chant and that this basic incompatibility led to the creation of new theoretical constructs. By tracing the path of subsequent adaptation at the nexus of tone-system, mode, and notation, Atkinson promises new and far-reaching insights into what mode meant to the medieval musician and how the system responded to its inherent limitations. Through a detailed examination of the major musical treatises from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, this text establishes a central dichotomy between classical harmonic theory and the practices of the Christian church. Atkinson builds the foundation for a broad and original reinterpretation of the modal system and how it relates to melody, grammar, and notation. This book will be of interest to all musicologists, music theorists working on mode, early music specialists, chant scholars, and medievalists interested in music.