Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890–1930, by Samuel N. Dorf

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Book Review| December 01 2020 Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890–1930, by Samuel N. Dorf Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890–1930, by Samuel N. Dorf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv, 221 pp. Rachana Vajjhala Rachana Vajjhala RACHANA VAJJHALA is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Boston University. She is currently at work on her first book, which looks at belle époque ballet in relation to contemporaneous culture physique. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020) 73 (3): 785–790. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.785 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rachana Vajjhala; Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890–1930, by Samuel N. Dorf. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2020; 73 (3): 785–790. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.785 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search In Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History, one of the characters defends the reenactment of an ancient bacchanal: It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one. At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice. … [W]e didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.1 Like Tartt's cohort of young classicists, the scholars and performers who populate Samuel N. Dorf's Performing Antiquity follow an imperative to know ancient Greece experientially rather than intellectually. In some ways, eccentric figures such as Natalie Clifford Barney and Théodore Reinach might seem more at home in Tartt's novel than in a musicological study, though... You do not currently have access to this content.