Books
Translating Symphonies and the Sacred: Choreomusical Perspectives on Contemporary Ballet (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming).
Contemporary ballet has embraced the appeal—and the challenge—of using existing scores from the Western art tradition. From George Balanchine and Maurice Béjart to Kenneth MacMillan, Heinz Spoerli, and Twyla Tharp, choreographers have delivered some of the most innovative choreographic works of the twentieth century through choreographed art songs, chamber compositions, concertos, and even symphonies. This book focuses specifically on the study of ballets set to the complete scores of large-scale compositions. Evening-long ballets, performed collaboratively with live orchestral and vocal forces, are both captivating and little explored.
This book offers four case studies of contemporary ballets, analyzed through the lens of choreomusicology—an emerging discipline that seeks to explore how a ballet’s modes of presentation (music, movement, gesture, lights, sets, texts) collaborate to create meaning. The four ballets by Uwe Scholz and John Neumeier encapsulate approaches to ballet symphonism and the sacred from a fresh, previously unexamined perspective. By using existing complete compositions, such as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Mahler’s Third, Mozart’s Mass in C minor and Bach’s Mass in B minor, Scholz and Neumeier embrace music that offer boundless possibilities for large-scale works to coexist fluidly within reimagined dance narratives. These balletic translations of symphonic and sacred music transcend their original borders and permit choreographers to superimpose contemporary ideologies, anxieties and ruminations on the human condition.
Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall. Edited by Eftychia Papanikolaou and Markus Rathey. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022.
Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall (Lexington Books, 430 pp.), explores interconnections of the sacred and the secular in music and aesthetic debates of the long nineteenth century. The essays in this volume view the category of the sacred not as a monolithic attribute that applies only to music written for and performed in a religious ritual. Rather, the “sacred” is viewed as a functional as well as a topical category that enhances the discourse of cross-pollination of musical vocabularies between sacred and secular compositions, church and concert music. Using a variety of methodological approaches, the contributors articulate how sacred and religious identities coalesce, reconcile, fuse, or intersect in works from the long nineteenth century that traverse an array of genres and compositional styles.
Chapters
“Uwe Scholz’s Choreographic Conception of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.” In Beethoven the European: Transcultural Contexts of Performance, Interpretation and Reception. Edited by Malcolm Miller and William Kinderman, 345-370. Speculum Musicae Series. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2023.
German choreographer Uwe Scholz (1958-2004), former director of the Leipzig Ballet, choreographed a number of Ballet-Symphonien set to symphonic compositions by Berlioz, Schumann, Beethoven, and Bruckner. In 1991 Scholz choreographed Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony for the Stuttgart Ballet, the company that had fostered his talent and which he had led as artistic director. Scholz was also responsible for the production’s costumes, and based the ballet’s set on a painting of the Unfurled series by American abstract expressionist Morris Louis. The result is visually stunning in its understated quality.
In this essay, I propose to address modes by which Scholz’s choreographic conception of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony enhances the work’s symphonic argument, while the Symphony is imbued with new layers of interpretation. The pairing of symphonic music with ballet movement, however, or—for lack of a better term—absolute music with a medium steeped in programmatic tradition, presents a wider challenge that demands theorizing the bridges and interrelationships between music and other media.
“Hieratic Iconoclasm: Liszt, Hanslick, and the Graner Festmesse.” In Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall, edited by Eftychia Papanikolaou and Markus Rathey, 121-144. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022.
In 1855, Franz Liszt was commissioned to compose the Gran Mass (Missa solemnis zur Einweihung der Basilika in Gran) for the consecration of the restored Esztergom [Gran] Cathedral, seat of the Catholic Church in Hungary. Liszt recognized the immense political and artistic scope of this undertaking: this occasion would give him the opportunity to travel back to his home country for the first time since he had settled in Weimar in 1848; and it would provide an opportunity to compose his first of two symphonic masses—both compositions that reflect his dubious ideology in the realm of church composition, a unique fusion of nationalism and religiosity.
In this essay I offer an account of its politicized genesis, and a review of the work’s extraordinary premiere and subsequent reception. With an emphasis on Eduard Hanslick’s unapologetically contentious criticism, I explore the multifaceted and nuanced nature of Liszt’s sacred music aesthetics.
“Spontini in città: Bach e la politica musicale a Berlino.” Translated by Chiara Bertoglio and Susanna Bucher. In Bach e l’Italia. Sguardi, scambi, convergenze, edited by Chiara Bertoglio and Maria Borghesi, 61-74. Lucca: Lim, 2022.
Italian translation (with updates and additions) of my article “Spontini and the City: Bach and Musical Politics in Berlin,” published in 2018.
Translated by Chiara Bertoglio and Susanna Bucher.
“Liszt and Religion.” In Liszt in Context, edited by Joanne Cormac, 163-171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
One of the most controversial and multifaceted aspects of Liszt’s life and career concerns his involvement with religion and the Catholic Church. The young Liszt maintained a distinctively secular profile as a flamboyant piano virtuoso of Mephistophelean powers and a restless Don Juan, replete with all the indulgences afforded a musical icon of his time. In his forties and fifties, however, his close relationship with the Catholic Church intensified; after a residency in the Vatican, he received minor orders and subsequently was known as Abbé Liszt.
This essay traces the construction of Liszt’s religious outlook, from his formative years in Paris in the 1830s, when the July Revolution provided the perfect catalyst for artists and intellectuals to engage actively in a platform of social reform, to his writings on sacred music, and his time at the Vatican. Liszt, who had advocated for the new role of the composer as priest of music, faithfully donned the cassock, and in 1865 he entered the four minor orders.
“On the British Reception of Ken Russell’s Mahler.” In Rethinking Mahler. Edited by Jeremy Barham, 163-182. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) constitutes one of the most idiosyncratic and, at the same time, rewarding composer biopics. In the film the narrative unfolds on a train that becomes the locus of the diegesis, and provides the occasion for a series of reminiscences through several overlapping flashbacks, interspersed with fantasy and dream sequences. By foregrounding the cinematic apparatus, Russell forces the viewer to put together Mahler’s life as if in a temporal puzzle, in a non-teleological fashion that comes in sharp relief to the linear progression of time implied by the train’s journey.
As I argue, the film also serves as a microcosm of reception history of Mahler’s life and music. Despite its obvious historical inconsistencies and extravagant modes of presentation, it performs a fascinating commentary on a composer still in the process of being discovered. Although the director achieves a remarkable visual and aural synchronization in the film between Mahler’s memories and his music (thus excerpts from the composer’s works function simultaneously as the mode and means of diegesis), Russell also aims to re-construct and manipulate Mahler’s—and also the audiences’—memories. In this essay I argue that Russell’s excessively exorbitant cinematic re-telling of the composer’s life articulates and comments on the reception of Mahler’s life and music at that particular point in time, thus perpetuating images and ideologies that were already in place. Instead of being a study in myth-making, Mahler encapsulates and appropriates the reception of the Mahler myth.
“Linking Christian and Faustian Utopias: Mahler’s Setting of the Schlußszene in his Eighth Symphony.” In Music in Goethe’s Faust, Goethe’s Faust in Music. Edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, 183-198. Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2017.
Due to its philosophically oriented dramaturgy and problematic reception, the second part of Goethe’s Faust provided the inspiration only for a limited number of large-scale nineteenth-century compositions. While Liszt’s symphonic setting of the “Chorus mysticus” at the end of his Faust-Symphonie (1854) and Schumann’s “Fausts Verklärung” from his Scenen aus Goethes Faust present unconventional responses to Goethe’s text, it was not until Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1906) that the Schlußszene from Faust II received an admittedly monumental treatment.
Mahler set the First Part of the Eighth to the Latin Pentecost hymn Veni creator spiritus, while the Second Part comprises an exalted melopoiesis of the final scene of Part II of Goethe’s Faust. The protagonist’s struggle and the drama’s mystical message of redemption seem to have resonated with the composer, as revealed in the genesis of the work and the way the music appropriates the drama’s religious overtones. In this essay I provide a broad exploration of the musical and spiritual unity that Mahler accomplishes between the two parts of the Eighth, with a focus on aspects of intertextuality, and explore the musico-dramatic choices for the Second Part of the Symphony.
“Trauma as Memory in Ken Russell’s Mahler.” In After Mahler’s Death. Edited by Gerold W. Gruber, Morten Solvik and Jan Vičar, 72-89. Olomouc, Czech Republic: Palacký University, 2013.
Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) constitutes, aesthetically and historically, one of the most idiosyncratic and rewarding composer biopics. In the film the narrative unfolds on a train, thus providing the occasion for a series of reminiscences through several overlapping flashbacks, interspersed with fantasy and dream sequences. By foregrounding the cinematic apparatus, Russell forces the viewer to put together Mahler’s life as if in a temporal puzzle. In this essay I argue that Russell filters the protagonists’ memories and presents them in modes directly analogous to the degree of trauma they suffered. By employing the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), I maintain that, despite the film’s obvious historical inconsistencies and extravagant modes of presentation, the cinematic techniques employed render the film a fascinating commentary on the composer’s life and work.
“Ταυτότητα και Εθνικότητα στη Μουσική του Peter Gabriel για την Ταινία του Martin Scorsese Ο Τελευταίος Πειρασμός.” In “The Last Temptation” and Its Transformations. Edited by George Grammatikakis and Antonis Leventis, 141-154. Heraklion, Crete: Kazantzakis Museum, 2011.
My Greek translation of my essay “Identity and Ethnicity in Peter Gabriel’s Sound Track for The Last Temptation of Christ,” published in 2005 in Scandalizing Jesus?: Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” Fifty Years On; invited by the Kazantzakis Museum, Greece.
“‘Interrogating the Sensuous in Manos Hadjidakis’s Soundtrack for Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie.” In Ελληνική Μουσική Δημιουργία του 20ού Αιώνα για το Λυρικό Θέατρο και Άλλες Παραστατικές Τέχνες [Greek Music in the Twentieth Century for the Opera and Other Performing Arts]. Edited by George Vlastos, 42-47. Athens, Greece: Syllogos Οi Filoi tīs Mousikīs [Friend of the Music Library], 2009.
In this short essay, part of conference proceedings, I discuss the music and songs Manos Hadjidakis wrote for Dušan Makavejev’s 1974 film Sweet Movie. Although the cinematic narrative is replete with shocking images that assault the viewer with outrageous and downright repulsive sequences, the film’s music operates in the realm of liminality. Instead of composing music that aurally accompanies the film’s acerbic style (itself a potent visualization of a political allegory), Manos Hadjidakis created one of the most attractive musical scores, reflective of his signature lyrical-poetic aesthetic. In stark contrast to the film’s explicitly vulgar and repellent images, Hadjidakis’s non-diegetic music forms a surprisingly appealing auditory staple whose pacifying potential borders on the manipulative. While he acknowledged the graphic imagery of the film, which he described as “a thousand needles penetrating our torpid nerves,” Hadjidakis also sought to provoke with his self-described “sugary-sweet taste” of the music.
“Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and the Aural Space.” In Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. Edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall, 224-236. New York and London: Continuum, 2007.
The volume won the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture by the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.
Unlike previously successful science-fiction television series, where music forms a stereotypical orchestral backdrop, nondiegetic music in Battlestar Galactica is mostly reduced to percussion sounds. The musical discourse highlights music of non-western flavor, and emphasizes the Other through unusual rhythms (as emblems of the Cylons), eerie ostinato patterns, exotic vocal sounds, and unconventional instruments (such as duduks), that subvert historicizing the narrative.
Bear McCreary’s ground-breaking soundtrack for the highly acclaimed sci-fi series, has received praise from fans and aficionados alike. In this essay I review the unique and novel way McCreary’s nondiegetic music underscores the narrative, and explore rare instances of intertextuality. Lastly, I focus on the Season Three ending, where music is foregrounded and becomes part of the plot: in a cliff-hanger finale, the filmic narrative appropriates a culturally, historically, and musically specific song (McCreary’s version of Bob Dylan’s 1967 song “All Along the Watchtower”), whose diegetic profile in relation to the plot is yet to be determined.
[This essay was published immediately after the end of Season 3; in Season 4, it becomes obvious that the song helps reveal the identity of the Cylons! Stay tuned for updates!]
“Identity and Ethnicity in Peter Gabriel’s Sound Track for The Last Temptation of Christ.” In Scandalizing Jesus?: Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” Fifty Years On. Edited by Darren J. N. Middleton, with a contribution by Martin Scorsese, 217-228. New York and London: Continuum, 2005.
Several aspects of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, have contributed to the film’s unprecedented originality. Both artists offer an iconoclastic view of the Bible: Kazantzakis through his deeply spiritual interpretation of the life of Jesus, whereby the human and the divine clash, and Scorsese through a cinematic lens that highlights Jesus’ humanity with unforeseen, almost unsettling honesty. The result is a film that both visually and aurally departs from the norm that Hollywood movies have established and offers a sophisticated alternative. Under this light, this essay explores how Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack further underscores the film’s separation from conventional clichés and helps highlight the ideological bond between Kazantzakis and Scorsese.
Given Gabriel’s intense fascination with world music—manifest in his numerous collaborations with world-music artists—the score for The Last Temptation of Christ appropriately projects a multi-ethnic approach. By tracing music practices and using traditional musicians from Africa and the Middle East, Gabriel aurally synthesizes an aesthetic that, from the novel’s pages to Jesus’s face on the screen, has the earmarks of stunning originality. Peter Gabriel’s approach comes in sharp contrast to accepted Hollywood ideals. Ultimately, the music here becomes a third voice that acts as a bridge between Kazantzakis and Scorsese—it not only comments on the drama, but it also acts as an interpreter of the film’s hopeful message. As I argue in this essay, the music for the film is inextricably infused with the same dialectic that penetrates the film’s narrative, between flesh and spirit, the human and the divine.
Articles
“Consecrating the Stage: Uwe Scholz’s Choreographic Completion of Mozart’s Große Messe.” Journal of Musicological Research 44, no. 1 (2025): 1-21.
In this essay I investigate Die Große Messe (1998), a contemporary ballet by German choreographer Uwe Scholz (1958–2004). Based on W. A. Mozart’s unfinished Mass in C minor and enhanced with music by Thomas Jahn, György Kurtág, and Arvo Pärt, this conceptually complex work constitutes a quasi-liturgical praxis, whereby choreomusical events demonstrate a humanistic re-imagining of the sacred ritual. Through the lens of choreomusicology, I analyze how the ballet’s media work synergistically to construct, communicate, and transfer meaning, while also reflecting back on the function of the Roman Catholic Mass as liturgy.
“Spontini and the City: Bach and Musical Politics in Berlin.” The German Quarterly (special issue on “Music and German Culture”; edited by Caroline Kita, Francien Markx, and Carl Niekerk) 91, no. 4 (2018): 389-399.
In April 1828, Gaspare Spontini conducted a concert spirituel at the Berlin Opera that included sections of the Credo from J. S. Bach’s Mass in B minor and the Kyrie and Gloria from Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. Spontini was Italian by birth, had conquered Parisian opera houses, and was at the time Generalmusikdirektor of the Berlin Opera. Amidst turbulent controversy and consequent intrigues, Spontini’s decision to pair Bach and Beethoven on the program encoded the concert with an overt political statement—the two giants of German music would be viewed in the context of the wider nationalistic politics surrounding German music, in general, and opera, in particular, in the first half of the nineteenth century. This essay places Spontini’s concert in the context of early nineteenth-century Bach revival, especially since it preceded Mendelssohn’s much anticipated performance of the St. Matthew Passion by almost a year.
“Whose Mourning?: Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon.” Choral Journal (Focus Issue on Robert Schumann) 51, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 18-30.
The famous poetic interpolations in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), especially the “Mignon” lieder, hold a prestigious place in nineteenth-century Lied literature. In 1849, a year that witnessed numerous celebrations surrounding the centenary of Goethe’s birth, Schumann created a comprehensive opus with nine out of the ten songs; in an unconventional turn, he chose to cap this collection of Lieder with a musical setting of Mignon’s funeral rites, a passage that appears later in the novel and that had never been set to music before. The Lied cycle and Mignon’s Exequien (as Goethe called the funeral scene) appeared in 1851 under a unified opus number, titled Lieder, Gesänge und Requiem für Mignon aus Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Op. 98. The prose text for the Requiem für Mignon comes from the opening of Book 8, Chapter 8 of Goethe’s novel, in which the author dramatizes the funeral rites that follow the unexpected death of Mignon.
On this 200th anniversary of Schumann’s birth [2010], I invite us to remember our hero by preserving the legacy of his choral-orchestral music. For institutional, cultural, and other reasons, the Requiem für Mignon and other such works have become, literally, disembodied—marginalized, very much like Mignon herself in Goethe’s novel. Outwardly they represent perfect vehicles for the Romantics’ predilection for the lofty and monumental—discourses that often elude us in our complex, post-modern present. At the same time, however, they invite us to commemorate our hero in dazzlingly original forms and exquisitely innovative styles that Schumann’s “new paths” helped pioneer.
“Romanticism as Border Crossing: The Case of the Symphonic Mass.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 13 (2005): 63-80.
The Romantic composers’ answer to the fusion of the sacred and the secular, or what Carl Dahlhaus has eloquently called “die Säkularisierung des Religiösen und die Sakralisierung von Profanem” (“the secularization of the religious and sanctification of the profane”), would have immense implications for twentieth-century musical aesthetics. I argue that the genre of the Romantic symphonic mass did not simply concern the move from the church to the concert hall. It also epitomized a move from private to public, a symbolic gesture of private subjectivity entering the public sphere.
“Brahms, Böcklin, and the Gesang der Parzen.” Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 30, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Fall 2005): 154-165.
Schicksalslied, Nänie, and the Gesang der Parzen constitute Johannes Brahms’s trilogy of choral-orchestral works set to texts inspired by Greek antiquity. Whereas considerable attention has been given to Max Klinger’s engravings inspired by Brahms’s Schicksalslied, little has been written about the associations of Nänie and the Gesang der Parzen with two other contemporary painters—Anselm Feuerbach and Arnold Bäcklin. When Feuerbach died in 1880, Brahms chose to memorialize the early death of his friend in Nänie. Schiller’s text abounds in allusions to the mythological figures that the painter himself had so successfully portrayed in his works, while Brahms’s music evokes a similar spirit, a counterpart to Feuerbach’s classicizing art. Böcklin’s paintings, which also drew extensively on classical myths, betrayed a more dynamic forcefulness than those of Feuerbach’s. In setting Goethe’s fatalistic verses from Iphigenie, Brahms manages to suggest but not impose musically, to imply but not assert—an approach directly analogous to Böcklin’s treatment of mythological figures, where nymphs and centaurs acquire an unusual richness in their suggestiveness, thus allowing the viewer to reconstruct the artist’s spirit. Similarly, Brahms’s music avoids literal mirroring of the text, when he deems it appropriate, as in the fifth strophe of the Gesang der Parzen; rather, it demands the participation of the listener to recreate the spirit that lies beyond the text, but that is only suggested by the music. Consequently, both artists do not adhere to Winckelmann’s Apollonian aesthetic, but rather their art betrays a Dionysian element that also reflects the changing aesthetics of the time.
“Aestheticism and the City: Gustav Mahler and Musical Politics in Fin-de-siècle Vienna.” Journal of Political and Military Sociology (Music and Politics Issue) 30, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 239-257.
The physiognomy of the city of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century appropriately reflected the political and cultural changes of the Hapsburg Empire after the 1848 revolutions. The sumptuous buildings erected along the Ringstraße, an assemblage of many different architectural styles, came to represent the extreme diversity and contradictions of fin-de-siècle Vienna and its inhabitants, and to affirm the power and glory of an – otherwise – aging Empire. Brilliant artistic life and cultural and financial prosperity, however, provided the Viennese with a layer of surface euphoria and escapism.
By extension, Gustav Mahler’s life and work ideally epitomized the paradoxes of the world he chose to inhabit. As Director of the Hofoper, Mahler monopolized Viennese musical life for a decade, while his compositions were perceived with skepticism. As I show in this essay, the harsh criticism he endured during the first five years of his tenure, represents only a summation of the personal, psychological, artistic and professional battles of his entire creative life.
Reviews
Book Review
Schubert’s Mature Instrumental Music: A Theorist’s Perspective, by David Beach (Eastman Studies in Music; Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017). Journal of Austrian Studies 51, no. 4 (2018): 83-85.
Book Review
E. T. A. Hoffmann, Missa and Miserere, WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, dir. Rupert Huber (CD). Nineteenth-Century Music Review 13, no. 2 (2016): 372-375.
Book Review
Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections, by Ralph P. Locke (Cambridge University Press, 2009). International Journal of Musicology, Belgrade 29, no. 9 (2009): 195-198.
Invited Review Essay
“The Art of the Ballets Russes Captured: Reconstructed Ballet Performances on Video.” Music Library Association Notes 64, no. 3 (March 2008): 564-585.
DVD review
Günter Wand Edition, Part I: Bruckner, Haydn, Schubert; NDR Sinfonieorchester, Günter Wand (DVD set); and Review of Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection”; Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Claudio Abbado (DVD). Music Library Association Notes 63, no. 1 (September 2006): 174-177.
Other Writings
Score preface
Preface to E. T. A. Hoffmann, Miserere, for chorus, soloists and orchestra (English and German). München: Musikproduktion Höflich, 2015.
Liner notes
Franz Schubert, Die schöne Müllerin, Georg Lehner, baritone, and Dino Mastroyiannis, piano. Liner notes in English and Greek. Compact Disc, Sheva Collection, Milan, Italy, 2014.
Liner notes
The Short Liszt: 16 Miniatures for Piano, Konstantinos Papadakis, piano. Compact Disc, D.S.H., 2012.
“When Music is Silent: ‘Listening’ to the Music of Ancient Greece through the Works of Ancient Greek Writers” [in Greek]. In Symposium Proceedings of the International Meeting on Music: ‘Music and Ancient Greece,’ European Cultural Center of Delphi, 5-11 August 1996, 195-214. Athens, Greece: Nea Synora, 1999.
The music of ancient Greece has been lost, and it is doubtful that the extant musical texts (which for the most part date from the Roman era) accurately reflect the music of ancient Greeks. Consequently, written texts come to bridge the void: musical treatises are studied, and exhaustive metrical analyses of the poetic texts try to restore the close relationship of ancient poetic language with music; at the same time, archaeological finds prove to be indispensable iconographic evidence when compared with corresponding written sources. Most often, though, written texts alone act as catalysts in our understanding of this music—they form a picture that has little to do with the sound itself and more with the nature, significance, and role of music as it was viewed and described by ancient writers.
From the description of Achilles playing the forminx in the Iliad to Aristophanes’s attack in the Frogs against Euripides and his musical innovations, in this essay I allow the poets themselves to talk about their music in context. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle enlighten (and even provoke) with their controversial views about music, while theorists such as Pythagoras and Aristoxenus marshal two contrasting theories on the way we perceive music. Although the actual sound of ancient Greek music has been irretrievably lost, its ideological importance remains forever scripted in the way ancient Greek writers thought about music.