STORIA E STORIOGRAFIA MUSICALE NEL PRIMO PERIPATO

The dissertation provides an overall study of history of music as a scholarly discipline within the early Peripatos, that is, in the writings of Aristotle’s direct and indirect pupils, dating between the second half of the 4th century BC and the end of the 3rd. It is known that Aristotle and his pupils were the first who systematically divided the domain of human knowledge into several distinct disciplines, to be studied with proper methods and tools; music makes no exception within this general framework. Furthermore, it is still Aristotle, followed by his disciples, who first develops the idea that the history of a discipline is intrinsically related to its theoretical study. This aspect proves to be particularly relevant within the domain of music, as shown by the remnants of Peripatetic writings devoted to this subject: most of them display an outstanding interest in understanding and reconstructing music in the past, first and foremost by collecting and interpreting literary evidence about it. Peripatetic writers also seem to be deeply influenced by the Aristotelian teleological conception, according to which every human art undergoes a diachronic evolution marked by a beginning, a progressive growth until its own nature is properly fulfilled and, eventually, a degeneration. This general idea proves to be particularly effective in the scholarly treatment of music by most Peripatetic scholars, affecting both their research interests (mostly the origins and the development of music through the archaic and classical eras) and their interpretation of musical changes through time (especially their severe criticism against the so-­‐‑called “new music”, a tendency that takes place from the late 5th century BC onwards). The effectiveness of this historical paradigm is also confirmed by its reception and exploitation in later sources, among which the pseudo-­‐‑plutarchaean De musica, which relies heavily on 4th century BC sources. The structure of the dissertation reproduces the chronological pattern outlined above. Following a general introduction concerning music in Aristotelian thought and its shaping as a theoretical discipline within his school, the three parts of the work are devoted each to a single period of ancient Greek musical history. Part I analyzes evidence about Peripatetic enquiry into the origins of Greek music, that is, the identification of its ‘first discoverers’ (Chapter 1), as well as the reconstruction of a pre-­‐‑Homeric history of epic singing (Chapter 2). Part II is concerned with music in the ‘historical’ (that is, not mythical or pre-­‐‑historical) past: Chapter 1 analyzes Peripatetic fragments that attempt at reconstructing lost musical habits (instruments, songs, dances), whereas Chapter 2 focuses on ‘innovations’ and ‘innovators’ during archaic and early classical eras. Eventually, in Part III Peripatetic evidence about ‘new music’, in its aesthetic and ideological implications, is discussed.