Ancient Greeks, world music, and early modern constructions of Western European identity

Abstract

David R. M. Irving shows how a foundational narrative of ‘ancient versus modern’ music, developed by Renaissance humanists and French writers through the early modern period, has helped the European enlightenment to define Western musical identity in comparison with other world regions, deemed to be closer to the origins of culture. He sees a major flaw of this interpretation in its teleological historiography, whereby modern Europe always appears as the last and most perfect stage of the world’s musical development. He argues that some early modern European ethnographers compared ancient Greek music with the musics of the world not to stress intercultural empathy, but as part of a discourse of exceptionalism that distanced ‘modern’ European music from ancient Greek music at the same time as distancing it from world musics.

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