Music and the Muses: The Culture of 'Mousike' in the Classical Athenian City

by Penelope Murray (Editor), Peter Wilson (Editor)

What was the role of mousike, the realm of the Muses, in Greek life? More wide-ranging in its implications than the English 'music', mousike lay at the heart of Greek culture, and was often indeed synonymous with culture. In its commonest form, it represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of music, poetic word, and physical movement, encompassing a vast array of performances - from small-scale entertainment in the private home to elaborate performances involving the entire community. Yet the history of the field, particularly in anglophone scholarship, has been hitherto narrowly conceived, and the broader cultural significance of mousike largely ignored. Focusing mainly on classical Athens these new and specially commissioned essays analyse the theory and practice of musical performance in a variety of social contexts and demonstrate the centrality of mousike to the values and ideology of the polis. The so-called 'new musical revolution' in late fifth-century Athens receives serious treatment in this volume for the first time. A major theme of the book is the musical and mousike dimension of Greek religion, rarely analysed in its own right. The ethical and philosophical aspects

452 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

Penelope Murray read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she also took her Ph.D. She held Research Fellowships at King's College London and St. Anne's College, Oxford, before becoming a founder member of the Department of Classics at the University of Warwick. She was promoted to a Senior Lectureship in 1998, but has recently taken early retirement to have more time to write. She works on early Greek poetry and poetics, on philosophical responses to Athenian song-culture, especially the views of Plato, and on ancient literary criticism. She is also interested in the ways in which approaches to literature in the Westen tradition have been shaped by the classical inheritance. She has written extensively on these subjects, including articles on the Muses and on ancient conceptions of imagination and inspiration. Her books include Genius: the History of an Idea (Blackwell 1989); Plato on Poetry (Cambridge 1996); Classical Literary Criticism (Penguin 2000); Music and the Muses: the Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, co-edited with Peter Wilson (Oxford 2004).Current projects include A Companion to Ancient Aestheticsfor Wiley Blackwell, co-edited with Pierre Destree, and a book on the Muses for the Routledge Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World series.

Reviews

[Nicolae Ghita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece! I would give 200 stars to this book!