Abstract:

In this article I briefly survey, from a synchronic perspective, the various occasions on which music of one kind or another was played in archaic and classical Greece (ca. 750-320 BCE), and discuss the different social functions served by these performances and the various effects that they made (or were supposed to make) on their audiences. A sociology of ancient Greek music should look somewhat different from a history of that music, and different too from a purely philosophical/aesthetic or technical appreciation of that musical culture; and I attempt to include both etic and emic accounts of what music amounted to, what it did for people, who (i.e. members of which social groups and classes) performed the various different kinds of music, and who listened and/or responded in one way or another to these different kinds, and trying to assess what ordinary Greek people, as well as theorists and philosophers, thought about the role of music and musicians within their larger social and existential world. This article attempts to take due account of the “liveness” and corporeality of all Greek musical performance, and of its strong, but not uniform, affective impact. In particular, I focus on differences of gender, status, and ethnicity, and on the social functionalities of different musical idioms and instruments (strings, pipes, and percussion) that we can identify from our various sources, both literary and visual. Overall, I find Aristotle (especially in the Politics) to be the most helpful and reliable guide.

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