Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought

Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought PDF

Author: Pauline A. LeVen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1009028391

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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.

A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music

A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music PDF

Author: Tosca A. C. Lynch

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-06-29

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 1119275490

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"This chapter provides an overview of the Muses in Greek mythology and argues that their multiplicity, their indefinite number, their lack of fixed personalities and their metapoetic status make them highly unusual members of the Olympian pantheon. As the embodiment of music and the means by which music is channelled to human beings they are essential to our understanding of the meaning of mousikē in Greek culture. Above all their origins in an oral society foregrounds the performative nature of music which has characterised it as an art form throughout the ages"--

Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses

Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses PDF

Author: Laura Salah Nasrallah

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-05-31

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 100940573X

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This book shows how Ancient Christians both used curses and criticized them in ancient Mediterranean religion and society.

Transformative Change in Western Thought

Transformative Change in Western Thought PDF

Author: Ingo Gildenhard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 1351538713

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This groundbreaking volume maps the shifting place and function of marvelous transformations from antiquity to the present day. Shape-shifting, taking animal bodies, miracles, transubstantiation, alchemy, and mutation recur and echo throughout ancient and modern writing and thinking and continue in science fiction today as tales of gene-splicing and hybridisation. The idea of metamorphosis lies in uneasy coexistence with orderly world views and it is often cast out, or attributed to enemies. Augustine and the church fathers consider shape-shifting ungodly; Enlightenment thinkers suppress alchemy as unscientific; genetically-modified wheat and stem-cell research are stigmatised as unnatural. Yet the very possibility of radical transformation inspires hope just as it frightens. A provocative, theorising, trans-historical history, this book ranges across classics, literature, history, philosophy, theology and anthropology. From Homer and Ovid to Proust and H. P. Lovecraft and through figures from Proteus to Kafka's Fly and toSpiderman, four historical surveys are combined with nine case studies to show the malleable, yet persistent, presence of transformation throughout Western cultural history.

Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece

Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece PDF

Author: Warren D. Anderson

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780801430305

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Drawing on a vast array of sources both in literature and in art, Warren D. Anderson here illuminates the place of musicians and music-making in Greek life from the Archaic to the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman periods. In his treatment of the musicians, Anderson addresses such topics as their costumes and sacral robes, their affinities with shamans and gods, the nature of their identification with the individual (the "outsider") or with the group, and their status as slaves or as freeborn citizens. As part of the larger picture, he discusses their instruments, principally the lyre or kithara and the double reed pipes, and he introduces the musical practices of other cultures as suggestive parallels. Appendices include technical descriptions of the instruments, details of scale-building and notation, and fragmentary remains of actual texts with notation, among them settings of passages from Euripides' tragedies.

Music and Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Music and Philosophy in the Roman Empire PDF

Author: Francesco Pelosi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-17

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 110883227X

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Explores the philosophical import and use of musical notions in crucial moments and authors of the Roman Imperial period.

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