History of Music Theory

Harvard FAS

Ancient Greek Music and its Afterlives. While Ancient Greece counts as the wellspring of western culture, its music was quite different from our own. This realization aroused surprise and controversy in 16th-century Italy, when scholars started studying ancient sources again. Adaptations of supposedly Greek music led to new and sometimes radical innovation. We will read salient texts from antiquity to the early modern period. A class trip to Italy, to study original sources and artifacts, is…