Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought

Examines questions raised, in antiquity and now, by mythical narratives about humans transforming into non-human musical beings.

Pauline A. LeVen (Author)

9781316602638, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 March 2022

290 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.427 kg

'The book presents an original and stimulating study on the myths of metamorphosis in relation to music, soundscapes and acoustic phenomena.' Sara Troiani, Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica

Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamorphosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with 'contemporary' debates – contemporary with debates in the Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.

Introduction
1. Forest: on surrounds
2. Ringdove: on the uncanny power of performance
3. Cicadas: on the voice
4. Echo: on listening
5. Reeds: on musical objects
6. Nightingale: on expression
7. Beetle: on rhythm.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Music [AV], The arts [A]