Sense and Sensation in Music

Abstract

This chapter aims to elicit ways in which ancient listeners, principally those of Classical Greek times, responded aesthetically to music. Ancient terms for aesthetic responses lack complexity, and the philosophical tendency is to think of mousikē in terms of its ethical effects. It is argued that this stems largely from the associations of mousikē with textual meaning. A distinction must therefore be drawn between the ancient term mousikē and our term “music.” This leads to a discussion of different elements of musical sound in antiquity (principally rhythms, melodies, and instrumental execution), how these may be accessed by the modern listener, and aesthetic issues that arise in relation to them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.