Music and Image in Classical Athens by Sheramy D. Bundrick (review)

Abstract

Music and Image in Classical Athens J. Harold Ellens When I was studying Classics and Philosophy in Calvin College and Seminary nearly a century ago, it was the standard assumption that we knew virtually nothing about Greek music and were not even very certain that it played a significant role in that ancient culture. Now Bundrick has given us a remarkably lovely volume that solves that problem and regales us with a world of information about the marvelous details of the dominant role that music played in forming the character and style of Classical Society and humane Civilization in Greece from the seventh‐ to the third‐century BCE. Sheramy D. Bundrick is the professor of art history at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. She cut her scholarly teeth as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000–2001. She also received the Kress Foundation and Fulbright Foundation grants for her work in research and publication. The cultural psychology evident in this work on the history of ancient Greek music is fascinating and profoundly erudite. Bundrick launches her volume with a quote from Euripides's treatise on Heracles: “Let me not live without music.” From that emotive evocation of the Pythagorean vision of the mathematical and musical structure of the entire universe, she moves swiftly and with gratifying illumination through the centuries of Classical Greek psycho‐social history. Her creative narrative paints a multicolored panorama of the heart, soul, psyche, aesthetic spirit, and craft of that wonderful ancient world. It is illumined by 110 plates depicting ancient musical instruments and typical musical performance settings. The entire import of this work is the assessment of the ways in which Greek music, its lyrics, instrumentation, and performance shaped the psyche of the ancient Greeks and their cultural character and style. Bundrick's skillfully crafted volume has six sturdy chapters, a helpful preface, 35 tightly packed pages of highly informative chapter notes, a useful glossary, nearly 300 select bibliographical entries, and a brief but adequate index. Her six chapter titles, in themselves, tell us an intriguing story about the trajectory of her quest to understand the lyrical spirit of the ancients upon whom we depend for so much of what we are today in Western Culture. Chapter 1 introduces the work with a dozen pages on “Music and Image in Fifth‐Century Athens, Sixth‐Century Music and Musical Imagery, The New Democracy, ‘New Music’, and New Musical Imagery.” This is followed naturally by the second chapter of 30 pages “Representing Musical Instruments.” It has three sections, as might be expected, treating stringed instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The first two are particularly interesting. Greek stringed instruments included the Chelys Lyre, Kithara, Barbitos, Phorminx, Thracian Kithara, and Harp. Wind instruments were mainly three, the Aulos, Syrinx, and Salpinx. Some of these instruments were unique, while in others we can see the primordial forms of our own modern ones. Chapter 3 offers us 45 pages on “Mousike: The Art of the Muses.” The questions that were important to the Greeks were (1) what it takes to become an Aner Mousikos (a musician in a virtually mystical sense), (2) the lessons one can learn from the legendary Linos, (3) Mousike and Gymnastike (the musical arts and physical heroism or physical and psychological character development), (4) amateur and professional Mousike at the Symposia, and (5) “Women and Mousike.” That exploration of the sociocultural function of the musical arts and the sociopsychological function of music in all its settings and expression reveals a remarkable side to the nature of the Greek spirit in individuals and communal assemblies. Chapter 4, entitled “Ethos and the Character of Musical Imagery,” therefore, follows this exposition appropriately. Its subtopics are (1) Music on the Edge: Dionysos and His World, (2) Ethos and Pathos in the Imagery of Orpheus, (3) a specific psychological study entitled Thamyris: Music and Hubris, and (4) Marsyas, the Musical Satyr. There follows, in chapter 5, a global Pythagorean psycho‐sociological dissertation on “Harmonia and the Life of the City.” It includes (1) The Harmonia of Apollo Kitharoidos, (2) Music and Cult Ritual, (3) Contest and Victory, (4) Music and the Theater, (5...