In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 436-440 [Access article in PDF] M. L. West. Ancient Greek Music. 1992. Rpt., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 424 pp. Paper, $28.00. For many years, lamentably, classical scholarship lacked a good book in English on the subject of Greek music as a whole, in spite of the indisputable prominence mousike had in Greek culture. M. L. West's book has filled that gap admirably. It (...) is indeed, as its publisher claims, "clear, comprehensive, and authoritative.""Clear." It is as clear as humanly possible, given the incredible complexity of the topic. Alhough it "presupposes no special knowledge of music," I fear the average unmusical student of Greek culture will eventually be totally lost in the jungles of Greek terminology or swept away in a torrent of unfamiliar names. A similar fate awaits the nonclassical student of musicology. But West has done a superhuman job of explaining everything step by step, and readers who are dedicated and careful will be rewarded with a solid understanding of a very complicated subject."Comprehensive." There can be no doubt that the book is comprehensive. It would be almost impossible to find a topic that has been overlooked, or an [End Page 436] ancient author that has been slighted or misrepresented. There are chapters on music in Greek life, the voice, stringed instruments, wind and percussion, rhythm and tempo, scales and modes, melody and form, theory, notation and pitch, musical documents, and a historical synthesis (in two parts). The book ends with an epilogue on the place of Greek music "between Europe and Asia."Modern scholarship has been thoroughly canvassed. I did, however, note one serious omission. West does not refer to F. Kuttner and J. M. Barbour, The Theory of Classical Greek Music (Musurgia Records 1955), in the text or bibliography. This book has a recording that allows one to hear the various phenomena discussed, affording an enormous improvement over trying to guess what an interval of, say, 63 cents sounds like."Authoritative." This bold claim is largely justified, especially in areas of special expertise, such as rhythm and ancient poetry. Controversial issues are not evaded; and, after a judicious and thorough laying out of the evidence, West comes down with a magisterial conclusion. He is usually right.The topic that most classicists are likely to be interested in, especially if they are studying Plato or Aristotle, is the "modes" (harmoniai), which are supposed to have such moral power that it is appropriate for a legislator to promote some and ban others. Readers will have to wait for chapter 6 to learn what West thinks about this issue.With his characteristic thoroughness, West begins with the anatomy of the octave, then the anatomy of the fourth into genera, enharmonic, chromatic, and diatonic. He mentions an earlier "pentatonic trichord," which evolves into a four-note unit with the small interval divided into smaller units (conventionally called "quarter tones"). He then discusses the "fine tuning" represented by the shades (chroai) treated by the Pythagorean, Aristoxenian, and Ptolemaic theorists. The last group makes a distinction between the tunings of theory and those of the actual tunings used in practice by (contemporary?) musicians.He then discusses "ambitus" or the region of the normal tessitura, interpreting (convincingly) "slack" as referring to pieces of music largely confined to the lower register and "tense" as the opposite. A discussion of the scales described by the fifth-century theorist Damon follows, but they are not "modal" (in the Western sense of scales differentiated by varying patterns of large and small intervals).There follows a thorough canvas of the ancient literature to expound references to the various harmoniai and their alleged moral and psychological effects. One truth emerges: the harmoniai were not "fixed and unchanging.... Old ones were discarded, new ones grew" (184). Unfortunately, however, he reaches no decision as to what, exactly, these harmoniai were.Even after the consolidation of the scales into the "perfect immutable system" (a master scale, which has various scales, tonoi, with the ethnic epithets Dorian, Phrygian, and so on), we cannot recognize what is meant in modern theory... (shrink)