Epos, singers, music

University of Siena
San Niccolò University Complex
Via Roma 56
53100 Siena

11 April 2024 2.30-7.30 p.m.

What was mousiké (sc. techne)? A continuum in which verbal art, singing and instrumental music were articulated as indissoluble parts of the same phenomenon. As has been known for several decades, for the vast majority of Greek poetic production, archaic and classical in particular, we should speak of ‘songs’ or ‘chants’ rather than ‘poems’, albeit with the necessary distinctions between epic (rendered in the mode of cantilenato) and lyric (monodic and choral). While this awareness has led to the definition of Greek culture as “song culture”, investigations that explore mousiké as a total social fact and as a complex sound phenomenon of speech, voice and music are still rare. This seminar day will discuss the premises for studying mousiké in this direction through the tools of historical anthropology, comparative studies and musical archaeology.

The seminar brings together scholars with different backgrounds (philologists, anthropologists, archaeologists) who discuss a common theme, that of the archaic Greek epic, attempting to reconstruct its performance-related aspects, starting from the ancient definition of mousikè, to investigate the relationship between singer, memory, poetic word, and to try to define the aedo’s sound and musical horizon, which can be reconstructed with a good margin of plausibility thanks to experimental archaeology.

The seminar was organised as part of the PRIN2022 project “Folklore and oral traditions in the Greek culture. From the Archaic to the Hellenistic period”.

PROGRAM

Manuela Giordano
Mousikè: the heuristic value of an ancient definition

Andrea Ercolani
CNR-ISMed
The blind cantor: between memory and performance

Laura Noviello
The instruments of the aedo
The contribution of musical archaeology for the reconstruction of mousikè

FINAL DEBATE

ORGANISED WITH
University of Siena, Department of Philology and Criticism of Ancient and Modern Literature – DFCLAM

SPONSORED BY
AMA Centre – Anthropology of the Ancient World

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Maurizio Bettini (Director of the AMA Centre – Anthropology of the Ancient World), Andrea Ercolani (CNR-ISMed), Manuela Giordano (University of Siena), Laura Lulli (University of L’Aquila), Riccardo Palmisciano (University of Naples “L’Orientale”), Livio Sbardella (University of L’Aquila)

HOW TO PARTICIPATE
The seminar is open to the public, subject to availability of places

INFO AND CONTACTS
andrea.ercolani@ismed.cnr.it
manuela.giordano@unisi.it