| Abstract [eng] |
The fundamental part in the analysis of the role of music in Antiquity is based not on the musical notation, but primarily on the textual treatises which describe under which circumstances and for what reason it was employed in such a great variety of religious, social, or political practices. In this article we would suggest that a great number of perplexities that arise on the ideological level, depend on the different meanings being attributed to the musical terms and on the very contextualised usage of language, which is our main source when approaching the conceptualisation of various phenomena from the distant past. Such considerations are especially relevant for the discussions of music of Antiquity, where mousikē itself was considered to be an umbrella term, comprising poetry, instrumental music, and body movement under its name. Discussing a period, when the philosophical and musical terminology is still forming, we risk facing anachronisms, homonymy, or polysemy, which leads to the diverse and even opposing views on the matter. As the examples of the ambiguous (or multi-layered) descriptions in the pri mary sources we would discuss the textual excerpts from the philosophical writings of Classical Greece, primarily by Plato and Aristotle, and demonstrate how the musical practices are attributed with the completely different value. Next to its artistic definition, mousikē encompasses other notions, such as the cosmic or political music, though the great variety of different conceptual layers is almost never analysed together. In such a research, the conceptual level becomes the most viable link towards a reasonable discussion of the music reception in Antiquity. We propose to reconsider the approach towards musical thinking and literary texts by distinguishing several conceptual layers which would allow to discuss mousikē in a more clearly defined way. |
