Ancient Music and Cross-Cultural Comparison (organized by MOISA)

Dissonance (Gurd 2016) makes the case that the remains of Greek song from the 6th and 5th Centuries BCE represent the earliest avant garde movement known in European cultural history, and invites a comparison between this tradition and the various avant gardes that populated the 20th Century (and, to a lesser extent, the early 21st). After a very brief overview of some of the evidence supporting the comparison, the purpose of this paper is to attempt to specify what it means to use avant-gardism as a basis for comparison in musical research.

The 1890s produced the discovery of several ancient Greek musical fragments, particularly the Delphic “Hymn to Apollo.” Describing the music as “weird” and “vexatiously monotonous, tedious, and unmusical,” even academic composers felt compelled to reorchestrate and expand upon the limited corpus of ancient musical texts.

Scholars of past decades writing on the Pythikos nomos often compared it to modern “program music” (Guhrauer 1875-1876; Gevaert 1881: 352; Seidenadel 1898; Grieser 1937: 70), especially Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, a famous example of program music considered the ancestor of the symphonic poem. More recently, Bélis has used the expression “sonate à programme” (Bélis 1999: 131). Indeed, the ancient Greek nomos does tell a tale, which is the program of its music. But scholars have underestimated the methodological implications of such a rich concept.

As Alexander the Great spread Hellenism through the Mediterranean to India, theatre venues expanded east far beyond Athens and theatre audiences grew more socially and ethnically diverse. Thus, we must ask how theatrical performances during this time succeeded in communicating the proper emotions to a mixed audience. In recent years, scholars of later Greek theatre have examined the problems of a more diverse audience in terms of gender, ethnicity and class, and exhort us to consider the input of non-Athenian, non-Greek communities (e.g.

Both Virgil (Aeneid, 685-713) and Propertius (Elegy III, 11. 39-56) present Cleopatra not only only as a femme fatale, but also as a dissonant voice in the overall poetic harmony of Augustan warfare. In her work on the feminine art of lament, Holst-Warhalft asserts that women’s tunes follow a musical pattern that contrasts dangerously with the official logos. The Oriental strain in particular was accused of a magical disharmony, “not contrary to Greek logos but to logos itself” (2002).