The New Music (original) (raw)
This chapter belongs to the section on "authors and forms" but the so-called "New Music" is, properly speaking, neither. The modern expression "New Music" refers both to a set of authors active on the Athenian theater stage between 430 and 380 bc, and to a set of formal changes that affected certain musical genres (in particular the dithyramb, the citharodic nome, and the sung parts of tragedy). But how sudden, how pervasive, and how revolutionary these changes were is difficult to establish: between the rhetoric of the New Musicians themselves, the biographical practices and ideological biases of ancient authors writing on music history, and the methodological premises of modern critics, it is very difficult to disentangle what is myth from what was reality. Nevertheless, this chapter aims at answering four questions: what is meant by the term "New Music"? What was new about the "New Music"? What did it sound, look, and feel like as experience? And what are new roads to explore the New Music? Although the questions look simple, the answers are complex and reveal why there has been a recent surge of critical interest for this fascinating phenomenon.
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Greek and Roman Musical Studies , 2019
This paper aims at presenting a preliminary survey of Peripatetic statements about the so-called 'New Music' as a significant turning point in musical history, addressed by most of the main exponents of the Peripatos as part of a wider engagement in the study of μουσική. The establishment of a 'history of music' , whose main phases are represented by its origins, its development through Archaic and Classical times and, eventually, its corruption into a 'degenerated' musical style, is crucial in the Peripatetic foundation of μουσική as a scholarly field of enquiry and is inherited by later sources that rely largely on Peripatetic materials, namely the pseudo-Plutarchaean De musica.
Bloomsbury Academics, 2023
This book explores the pivotal role played by ancient mousike-in all its facets-in the development of musical practices and ideas throughout history. The discussion is structured around the key concepts, theoretical models, and aesthetic issues at play – from the educational and therapeutic value of music to its place in the ideal of cosmic harmony and its relationship to the senses and emotions – as well as the function of music in debates around individual and cultural identity. What emerges is a timely reassessment of the paradigmatic value of the Greek model in the musical reception of antiquity in different historical periods. It highlights the ongoing contribution of mousike to modern cultural debates within the realms of classics, musicology, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, performance, and cultural studies, as well as in artistic environments, and offers a clear and comprehensive account of its inexhaustible source of inspiration for musicians, theorists, scholars, and antiquarians across the centuries.
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in Poesia,musica e agoni nella Grecia antica, Poetry, Proceedings of the IVth International Meeting of MOISA, Lecce, October 2010, Rudiae, Ricerche sul Mondo Classico, 22-23 Vol.1 published by Universita degli Studi di Lecce, Editors: D.Castaldo-E.G.Giannachi- A.Manieri,, 2011