The purpose of this book is to highlight the role of music in cultural memory, communication and commemoration in Greek and Roman societies, an ambitious aim for which the editors have brought together contributors from different disciplines (art historians, philologists, performance scholars, historians and ethnomusicologists). With eleven chapters and an introduction, the book is divided into five parts that deal with the different aspects in which musical memory revealed itself and formed part of the social, cultural, ritual and political life of Greece and Rome. The topic of this work is novel, but very difficult to define precisely given the essence of the subject matter: musical memory, something as ethereal and subjective as trying to describe the aromas that each individual perceives in a spice market. It is true that today we have ancient texts that speak of memory and music, but the interpretations that could be made then, as now, regarding the impression of a piece of music on listeners or of a particular dance on spectators are as varied as the opinions themselves. It is therefore risky to voice categorical statements in this respect.
The introduction, by the editors, in addition to offering an overview and justification of the book as a whole, highlights the main contributions collected in it and singles out two works that anticipate the dynamics of this study: the interaction of music and memory in the banquet scenes in the Etruscan tomb of the Triclinium and vv. 1026–7 of Aristophanes’ Frogs, which reveal the complexity of the collective memory of the audience. The works of L. Moreno on the etymology and role of Mnemosyne and Mousa are missing, and serious errors, increasingly widespread, are detected in the definitions of aulos and tibia (p. 4), which denote a lack of consultation and careful analysis of the ancient texts on music in Greek and Latin. In the first part of the book, ‘Approaching Music and Memory’, in Chapter 1, M. Griffith collects and analyses ancient Aristotelian theories about the relationship between music and memory. However, Griffith acknowledges the lack of interest on the part of the Greeks in this question, except in the case of Aristotle, whose theories of acoustic perception Griffith forcibly fits in with his accounts of human imagination and the workings of memory. This would account for a short-term musical memory, as Aristoxenus says (Harm. 2.39.1–2), but not for a long-term one, something difficult to prove for these ancient societies.
The chapters of Part 2, ‘Music, Body, and Textual Archives’, are influenced by the work of D. Taylor. Chapter 2, by S. Olsen, seeks to demonstrate how Plutarch's account of the defeat of the Minotaur by Theseus, commemorated by the dedication of objects in Delos and the performance of a choral dance, demonstrates the relationship between reading and writing, reproducing and configuring various forms of knowledge, experience and memory. For Olsen, Plutarch builds his account as something that both represents and surpasses the archival objects and practices embodied in it. However, it is not possible to demonstrate the level of awareness of the archaic and classical literary tradition of Plutarch's ancient readers or their direct experience of different forms of choral performance; so it is not possible to know the potential that this account would have had to activate memories. In Chapter 3 Curtis analyses the way in which Livy's account of the events of 207 bce tries to shape Roman collective memory through a hymn composed by Livius Andronicus and performed by a chorus of maiden-dancers on the streets of the city as a measure of religious urgency. Curtis's study, neatly and coherently presented, demonstrates that Livy's account brings together multiple modes of memory (musical performance, monumental narrative and ritual text) as well as multiple ways of reacting to the musical rite. Chapter 4, by Z. Alonso Fernández, follows the same line; starting from the Varronian definition of meminisse and memoria and its implications (inscription of monuments written in stone and interpretation of the Carmen saliare), it examines the connection between the dance performance of the cult of the Fratres Arvales and what is recorded and remembered by an inscription that evidences their activities and their incorporation into the Roman cult, and which puts them in the context of the practices of Roman memory.
In Part 3, ‘Technologies of Musical Memory’, Y. Trnka-Amrhein analyses epigrams of Posidippus and Hedylus as examples of the combination, in Ptolemaic Egypt, of two cultural forms of human and mechanical memory: one traditional and another innovative, the former through the analysis of the musical automaton rhyton, a creation of Ctesibius, described by Hedylus, possibly used in a religious ritual where young people would have participated and whose music was played in endless repetition, and the latter through the narration of the lyre of Arion, a long deceased master and virtuoso musician. Both documents allow Trnka-Amrhein to demonstrate that the audience was able to recall a music and performance they never attended, proposing to consider the automated rhyton as an attempt to represent the Ptolemaic Graeco-Egyptian empire by specifically incorporating the Nile Hymn. In Chapter 6 P. McMurray introduces and explains the concept of ‘teichoacoustic’, analogous to ‘teichoscopy’, i.e. the wall as an explicit and well-calibrated spatial medium for the transmission of sound, as a ‘sonic medium’ capable of creating layers of sensory memory and history. To confirm the proposal and demonstrate the productive relationship between sound and wall, McMurray draws on four walls and related mythical and historical facts, well known to tradition: in mythology, the walls of Babylon and their importance in the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, comparing the versions of Ovid, Shakespeare and the Beatles; in epic, those of Troy and Helen's visit to them, from where she tells Priam what she sees on the battlefield, according to the Iliad; in tragedy, the creation of the walls of Thebes to the sound of Amphion's music, revisiting stories that allude to it with special attention to Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes; and in history, the discovery of two musical hymns on the walls of Delphi with musical notation, in honour of Apollo, inscribed and composed by the technitai Limenio and Athenaeus.
The chapters of Part 4, ‘Audience, Music, and Repertoire’, link with the previous ones as they try to show ‘how music and memory come together in a particular place and time’ (p. 20). Inspired by R.M. Schafer, T. Power presents in Chapter 7 the ritual cry of Iacchus, which was uttered in the Eleusinian Mysteries and is recorded in Aristophanes’ Frogs, as a ‘soundmark’, a unique communal sound whose qualities make it especially highly regarded by the people of a community. With an argument poorly supported by ancient texts and based on conjecture, the aim here is to demonstrate the emotional and cognitive extent of what may have been the early public response to this soundmark of religious, political and historical importance. Power's conjecture is that its evocation in Frogs would have given voice to nostalgia and cultural and political longing for the Athenian victory at Salamis. However, no ancient document confirms this assessment. Chapter 8, by Weiss, reviews a series of scenes depicted on Attic pottery in the mid to late fourth century bce, with animal choruses, animal riders and/or men in animal costumes or ornaments, in dancing and singing positions accompanied by the aulos. In the analysis, without confirmation in classical written sources and without a clear conclusion, Weiss aims to trace part of the affective impact of the creation of ‘proto-theatrical’ music and to interpret these scenes as activators that engage with and participate in the spectator's memory of the choral performance, specific or multiple. Its aim is, therefore, to activate, by means of these vessels, the spectator's cultural repertoire of choreia in their memory of the performance. The consideration of a piece from Etruria demonstrates, for Weiss, the possible continuity of cultural practice with Athens. Chapter 9, by T.J. Moore, recalls what has been studied in previous works by the author. Here he analyses the role of metre on remembered music in the comedies of Plautus and Terence in analogy with the American musical, where memory also plays an essential role. Drawing on Cicero's and Ovid's claims about spectators’ musical memory, Moore analyses the musical patterns of Plautus and Terence through metre and especially those of Amphitruo as responding to ‘the audience's musical memories to reinforce that play's transcendence of generic norms’ (p. 236). His suggestion that the music of Plautus’ and Terence's plays drew on the collective memory of a play's earlier music, on the musical conventions of the genre and on certain musical moments from earlier plays is very much to the point. He is also correct in recognising four patterns used by Plautus in this play, but not in his assumption that tibicines employed circular breathing: there is no reference in the sources, written or iconographic, to confirm this assumption, and the capistrum helped to maintain the tension of the embouchure in the breath, but would preclude this technique originally developed in the thirteenth century by Mongolian metalsmiths and linked to the players of the didgeridoo of Aboriginal Australia.
The last part, ‘Music and Memorialization’, deals explicitly with music and memory in the domain of mourning. In Chapter 10 S. Estrin draws on the image of the Siren-stelai, depicted with gestures of grief on funerary monuments and with a kithara (and aulos), to study multiple individual instances of mourning and the connection between music and memory in classical Athens. Estrin's analysis, complemented by vv. 164–78 from Euripides’ Helen, concludes that Sirens create in spectators the need to respond as active mourners in their remembrance of the deceased in a synesthetic dimension. Chapter 11, by S.D. Bundrich, reviews the musical iconography in the hands of the living and/or dead (eidola) on fifth century bce Athenian White-Ground lekythoi, funerary vessels with information about Athenian mortuary customs and beliefs. The most represented instrument is the chelys, a lyre from early Greece, whose presence on these lekythoi reinforces the performative memory of the deceased and of the living, who had an obligation to the deceased. For Bundrich, the commemorative dimension of music could serve as mnemata for the deceased and evoke certain virtues, such as sophrosyne, although she ignores the texts of Plato and Aristotle that speak about this issue. She is therefore correct in her assumption that they could refer to a traditional musical education, the archaia paideia, an idea supported by recent studies of funerary practices and the discovery of instruments in Athenian tombs.
This volume, which is neatly and carefully edited, is vague in the assertions claimed in some of its chapters, as they are poorly supported, but gets it right in others. What is missing, however, is a final conclusion that brings together the overall results of this study.
