Carolyn M. Laferrière (Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for the Premodern World, University of Southern California)
When modern viewers encounter Greek scenes of music-making, the images remain stubbornly silent, offering a mere trace of the vibrant musical culture of late Archaic Athens. Yet, the powerful reactions exhibited by the men and women who are shown listening to the performances of poets, symposiasts, or hetairai suggest a pervasive attempt to make visible the sounds of the instruments. It is especially in late Archaic red-figure vase-paintings of famous poets that music and song are notably consistent visual features: Orpheus captivates Thracian soldiers with his lyric song, Sappho plays her barbitos, Alkaios sings and plays his lyre, and Mousaios oversees the Muses’ performance. In each instance, the poet’s music affects its audience, suggesting a marked tension for the external viewer between the representation of music and the absence of sound. These images encourage us to ask how musical sounds could be conveyed through visual media, what effect these auditory performances may have had on their viewers, and, moreover, how the context in which the vase-paintings were seen interacted with these images of music-making. In other words, how might symposiasts responded to the superlative poetic performances? In this paper, I argue that the poets’ music and song, communicated through the formal elements that constitute each scene, were designed to interact with the soundscape of the symposium, so that the poetic music became accessible to the audience, who, by looking at the visual images, were invited to imaginatively hear and participate in the music-making.
This paper builds upon scholarship that treats representations of ancient poets (Bundrick 2005; Yatromanolakis 2007), visual attempts to convey song (Lissarrague 1990; Yatromanolakis 2016), and the aesthetic consequences of visualizing music (Porter 2010; Laferrière 2020). I examine three representations of poets: a krater depicting Orpheus, who plays his lyre for Thracian soldiers (Berlin 3172); an amphora featuring Mousaios overseeing the Muses’ music (London E271); and a kalathos depicting Alkaios and Sappho performing (Munich 2416). I show how each formal composition is structured through the lines and forms that repeat among musician, instrument, and audience, all of which convey the presence of music and song, as well as the specific affective quality of that music. I suggest that the character of the poet’s music becomes visible through the composition of the scene itself, so that each image invites its viewers to see the poetic song. I end by considering the sympotic context in which these vases would have been seen and used. By inserting into the symposium both the depiction of renowned poets and the visualized sounds of their music, each image offered the symposiasts the opportunity to imaginatively listen within a space already filled with music, poetry, and dance. Within the symposium, where the personae of gods, heroes, or mortals could be adopted for the evening’s festivities, the multisensory experience of looking and listening to scenes of poetic song also offered the symposiasts themselves the opportunity to become these very poets, capable of performing masterfully as Orpheus, Alkaios, or Sappho, even if only for an evening.