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Review: Ancient Music in a Medieval Mirror

CLASSICISTS, Byzantinists and neo-Hellenists are generally well aware of the problems presented to modern scholarship by the durability of Greek in its various forms as a living language and the long shadows cast by the cultural heritage of antiquity.1 Ranging from the hermeneutical to the political, these include the difficulties associated with interpreting Byzantine secular literature saturated by archaisms – famously described by Cyril Mango as a ‘distorting mirror’2 – and the recent and still unresolved political controversies over the appellation of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Members of the general public, on the other hand, tend to encounter such problems most directly when, in preparation for their summer holiday, they buy a self-study guide to ‘Greek’ only to discover that they might have had better luck at their hotel if they had bought one with the word ‘modern’ in the title. Musicologists need not travel very far before they too run into difficulties. The revised New Grove Dictionary’s entry ‘Greece’, for example, is divided chronologically into four sections: the first addresses the music of antiquity and the remaining three are concerned with the musical traditions of Greek-speakers after 1453.3 What happened in between is discussed in other articles about music that is labelled ‘Byzantine’, but was actually performed by people who called themselves ‘Romans’ (a practice generally continued by Greek-speakers living under Ottoman rule). To complicate matters further, the survival of the extant corpus of writings on ‘ancient Greek music’ is primarily attributable to the intellectual elite of these same Romaioi. Within the context of an educational curriculum that had changed little since late antiquity, successive generations of Byzantine scholars studied, copied and edited the works of such authors as Aristoxenus, Ptolemy and Aristides Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 no. 2 298–304 © Royal Musical Association (2004); all rights reserved