Music and Image in Classical Athens

Bundrick proposes that depictions of musical performance were linked to contemporary developments in music.

Sheramy Bundrick (Author)

9780521848060, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 October 2005

274 pages, 110 b/w illus.
25.4 x 17.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.87 kg

'… a remarkably lovely volume … [it] regales us with a world of information about the marvelous details of the dominant role that music played … Sell your bed and buy this book!' J. Harold Ellens, Journal of Psychology and Christianity

During the fifth century BC, Athens witnessed the explosion of images depicting musical performance, such as Apollo and the Muses, frisky satyrs, the poet Orpheus, youths at school, brides at weddings, and the dead at tombs. Primarily found in vase paintings, but also in sculpture and now-lost wall paintings, these images provide insight into the musical culture of the time, In this study, Sheramy Bundrick proposes that the depictions of musical performance were intimately linked to contemporary developments in the field of music itself, such as the debate over music in education, theories of musical ethos, and the growing popularity of professional musicians. Moreover, she argues that music became a visual metaphor for the harmony - or disharmony - of the city. Her book is the first to consider the broad range of musical images in the dynamic classical period, as well as their sociocultural and artistic implications.

1. Music and image in fifth-century Athens
2. Representing musical instruments
3. Mousike: the art of the Muses
4. Ethos and the character of musical imagery
5. Harmonia and the life of the city
6. Conclusion: musical revolutions in Classical Athens.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], History of art: ancient & classical art,BCE to c 500 CE [ACG]