Oxford Academic Music as Classical Reception Amplifying Antiquity (Classical Presences)

Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity investigates music as a site of classical reception, from the early modern rise of opera to contemporary hip-hop. The wealth of music inspired by Graeco-Roman antiquity rests on an apparent paradox: compared with visual art, linguistic texts, or material culture and architecture, ancient music left few traces for later listeners, and those that remained were not audible in any straightforward sense; nonetheless, this near silence has made space for an extraordinary variety of musical receptions. The book not only offers case studies of the generative encounter between antiquity and later music makers, but also asks how new sounds are imagined as turning up the volume on a past that is currently muted or inaudible. In thinking through this question from different angles, the volume proposes amplification as a new model for reception studies, with relevance to the wider field. The chapters range widely across musical genres and classical sources (myth, epic, lyric, history, philosophy, and archaeology), but they are united by attention to amplification as a rhetorical technique, a set of technologies, and a sonic concept. Drawing on classics, music, sound studies, intellectual and cultural history, and literary studies, they are arranged to reflect three different modes and contexts of reception: musical settings of ancient words; musical reimaginings of ancient lives, ideas, and myths; and more expansive musical encounters with antiquity that are powered by electric amplification and the media changes that come in its wake. Oxford Academic Music as Classical Reception Amplifying Antiquity (Classical Presences)