No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Ancient Music in a Medieval Mirror - Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Publications of the Center for the History of Music Theory, 2. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xvi + 806 pp. ISBN 8032 3079 6.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
- Type
- Book Reviews
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Royal Musical Association (2004)
References
1 The bibliography is vast, but a particularly enlightening case study is Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
2 Cyril Mango, ‘Byzantine Literature as a Distorting Mirror’, Byzantium and its Image, Variorum Collected Studies, 191 (London, 1985), ii, 3–18. See also the essays contained in Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art and Music, ed. Antony Robert Littlewood (Oxford, 1995).Google Scholar
3 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edn, London, 2001), x, 327–59.Google Scholar
4 For a general treatment of the transmission of ancient literature in Byzantium, see Wilson, Nigel Guy, Scholars of Byzantium (Baltimore, 1983). The humanists' reception of Greek writings on music is discussed in Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985).Google Scholar
5 Christian Troelsgård, Ancient Musical Theory in Byzantine Environments, Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen-Age Grec et Latin, 56 (Copenhagen, 1988), 228–38.Google Scholar
6 J⊘rgen Raasted, The Hagiopolites: A Byzantine Treatise on Musical Theory, Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen-Age Grec et Latin, 45 (Copenhagen, 1983).Google Scholar
7 See, for example, John G. Landels, Music in Ancient Greece and Rome (London and New York, 1999). Warren D. Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994) does not venture beyond classical Athens.Google Scholar
8 West, Martin L., Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), 385.Google Scholar
9 Egert Pöhlmann and Martin L. West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music: The Extant Melodies and Fragments Edited and Transcribed with Commentary (Oxford, 2001). An unembellished performance of all 65 pieces and fragments contained in this book would fit easily on a single CD.Google Scholar
10 See, for example, Panagiotes S. Antonellis, Byzantine Church Music: Its History and Modern Development (Athens, 1956), 206.Google Scholar
11 Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (2nd edn, Oxford, 1961), 1–64.Google Scholar
12 Mathiesen, Thomas J., Ancient Greek Music Theory: A Catalogue raisonné of Manuscripts, RISM B/XI (Munich, 1988). See also Mathiesen's articles ‘Aristides Quintilianus and the Harmonics of Manuel Bryennius: A Study in Byzantine Music Theory’, Journal of Music Theory, 27 (1983), 31–47, and ‘Hermes or Clio? The Transmission of Ancient Greek Music Theory’, Musical Humanism and its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca, ed. Barbara R. Hanning and Nancy K. Baker, Festschrift Series, 11 (New York, 1992), 3–32, as well as the articles by various scholars (including Mathiesen) in Music Theory and its Sources: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. André Barbera (Notre Dame, IN, 1990).Google Scholar
13 See, for example, Andrew Barker, review of Thomas Mathiesen, Aristides Quintilianus On Music in Three Books: Translation with Introduction, Commentary and Annotations (New Haven, 1983), Ancient Philosophy, 4 (1984), 255–62; and Simon Goldhill, review of Apollo's Lyre, Early Music History, 20 (2001), 276–7.Google Scholar
14 Mathiesen's attempt on p. 533 to defend his earlier translation of 
as ‘calls to mind’ in a key passage of Aristides Quintilianus must be regarded as a failure. Anderson (Music and Musicians, p. 154, n. 9) is unquestionably correct when he calls this translation misleading and offers ‘mentions’ as a more suitable rendering.Google Scholar
15 Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, i: The Musician and his Art; ii: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory (Cambridge, 1989).Google Scholar
16 See, for example, Albert A. Howard, ‘The Mouth-Piece of the 
’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 10 (1899), 19–22 (p. 19); Kathleen Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos (London, 1939; repr. Groningen, 1970); and John G. Landels, ‘The Reconstruction of Ancient Greek Auloi’, World Archaeology, 12 (1981), 298–302.Google Scholar
17 Drawing attention both to this discrepancy and to Barker's explanation that his decision to omit these texts was made in part on stylistic grounds, Mathiesen (p. 16) makes a dubious and gratuitously triumphalistic comparison of ‘non-musical scholars’ and ‘musicologists, accustomed to the wide diversity of evidence that must be controlled in dealing with nearly any musical subject’.Google Scholar
18 A succinct introduction to relevant developments in Byzantium's ecclesiastical sphere may be found in John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (2nd rev. edn, New York, 1987), 1–78, 103–14 and passim.Google Scholar
19 See, for example, the texts collected in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. and ed. Gerald Eustace Howell Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, i (London, 1979). The exemplary glossary found on pp. 357–68 of this volume may also be of some use to those confused by Mathiesen's often baffling transliterations (e.g. ‘epithymetic’ and ‘thymic‘) and translations on pp. 544–8 of Apollo's Lyre.Google Scholar
20 In this regard, it is remarkable that two of the primary combatants in the bitter and politically disruptive fourteenth-century controversies over the mystical theology of hesychast monks, namely Nicephoras Gregoras and Barlaam the Calabrian, also debated the proper restoration of passages in Ptolemy's Harmonics, a fact mentioned but not further investigated by Mathiesen on p. 434.Google Scholar
21 For a new edition with commentary, see Pöhlmann and West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music, 190–4.Google Scholar
22 See, for example, the statement on p. 642 erroneously positing ‘the replacement of the old university at Constantinople in the seventh century with a new Ecumenical college controlled by the Church’. For a more recent assessment, see Kazhdan, Alexander, ‘University of Constantinople’, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al., iii (New York and Oxford, 1991), 2143.Google Scholar
23 See above, note 12.Google Scholar
24 Troelsgård, ‘Ancient Musical Theory’; Lukas Richter, ‘Antike Thematik und byzantinische Aneignung: Zu einem musiktheoretischen Text aus der Palaiologenzeit’, Neues musikwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 5 (Augsburg, 1996), 9–39; idem, ‘Antike Überlieferungen in der byzantinischen Musiktheorie’, Acta musicologica, 70 (1998), 133–208; idem, ‘Zur Lehre von den byzantinischen Tonarten: Kenntnisse, Erkenntnisse und Probleme’, Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (1996), 324–90, and (1997), 211–60; Peter Jeffrey, ‘The Earliest Oktoechoi: The Role of Jerusalem and Palestine in the Beginnings of Modal Ordering’, The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and Bridges, East and West, in Honor of Kenneth Levy, ed. Jeffrey (Woodbridge and Rochester, 2001), 147–209.Google Scholar