Music and Politics in the Ancient World

Music and Politics is the outcome of an international workshop held in Berlin in June 2011, under the title 'Sound, Political Space and Political Condition: Exploring Sounds of Societies under Change'. Focusing on the poetics of emerging music-archaeological narratives, it seeks to test assertions made by writers of the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE that political change is reflected in music. It asks whether politics' footprint might be discerned in surviving records of music and sound - thereby serving as a marker for social and political change. Taking advantage of several distinct yet complementary traditions of criticism which, where they overlap, make up the young and expanding fields of music archaeology and archaeoacoustics, the chapters seek, in a constructive way, to disrupt old ways of visualising the archaeological past. Along the way ancient music is revealed as much more than just a form of entertainment. From a traditional preoccupation with systematics, music archaeology aims to forge a broader theoretical engagement between music studies and the remote past, and to establish music's place within the wider arena of Ancient Studies. --- In der Reihe BERLIN STUDIES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD erscheinen Monographien und Sammelbände aller altertumswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen. Die Publikationen gehen aus der Arbeit des Exzellenzclusters "Topoi. The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations" hervor, einem Forschungsverbund der Freien Universität Berlin und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin sowie den Partnerinstitutionen Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Die Reihe ist Bestandteil der Publikationsplattform Edition Topoi. Alle Bände der Reihe sind elektronisch unter www.edition-topoi.org verfügbar.