Through their distinctive iconography and dedicated function as funerary vessels, Athenian white-ground lekythoi of the fifth century BCE serve as significant testimonials about attitudes toward and treatment of the dead. Although the images on lekythoi were not intended as documentary, they nonetheless grant insight into mortuary customs practiced by families and how Athenians conceptualized the deceased and his or her memory. Musical references, while never a predominant subject, can be found on lekythoi throughout their production history. Both living people (male and female) and spirits of the dead (eidōla) hold or play instruments on the vases; instruments can also appear as offerings left at tombs. The multivalence of musical instruments, especially the chelys lyre that is most often depicted, allowed painters to use them to their best symbolic advantage. They can reference a traditional musical education, the archaia paideia, but also evoke virtues like sōphrosynē and commemorative laments performed in honor of the deceased. Recent scholarship on mortuary theory and the deposition of actual instruments in Athenian graves helps support such readings. Whether “real” or pictorial, musical instruments – like the white-ground lekythoi themselves – served as performative objects of memory and mnēmata for the deceased.

This chapter explores how Diana Taylor’s definition of “archive” (e.g., historical artifacts and written records) and “repertoire” (performance practices) as distinct but related forms of cultural memory illuminates the representation of mythic performance in Plutarch’s Lives. More than simply applying modern performance theory to ancient texts, my analysis brings Plutarch into dialogue with Taylor, showing that he reflects upon similar theoretical problems in a distinctive way. In recounting Theseus’ visit to Delos, Plutarch describes how the hero’s defeat of theMinotaur is commemorated by object dedication and choral dance. These two acts of memory are closely intertwined, as both ritual object and mimetic dance function as vehicles to transmit specific elements of the myth. Yet Plutarch also questions the efficacy of dedications and performance practices as such vehicles, calling attention to the limits of both object endurance and mimetic song-dance. By positioning his own writing as a form capable of encompassing and surpassing both the archive and the repertoire, he ultimately reveals how the literary text itself both instantiates and complicates those very distinctions.

The editors’ Introduction provides an overview of and rationale for the volume as a whole. It highlights the book’s key contributions and conceptual frameworks, in part by offering two brief case studies – or “snapshots” – of the dynamic interplay of music and memory in different times, places, and media: Etruscan tomb painting and Athenian comedy.

This chapter explores the relationship between theatrical music, visual record, and audience memory as mediated by a group of Attic vases, mostly dated from the mid- to late sixth century BCE, that show choruses of animals, animal-riders, and/or men wearing animal costumes. I argue for a new interpretation of these sympotic vessels, whereby they are understood as objects that engage and participate in a viewer’s memory of choral performance. I emphasize the referential flexibility of such images of theatrical music-making, which can evoke one specific performance but also, simultaneously, multiple performances across various genres. The vases thus activate a viewer’s cultural repertoire of choreia, which could include his own bodily experience of singing and dancing in a chorus; in doing so, they draw him in as both spectator and performer within their own choral productions.

A wall is a sonic medium. It gathers, reflects, amplifies (or sometimes attenuates), and otherwise processes sound; it thereby creates strata of sensory memory and history. Rethinking the notion of teichoscopy (the use of walls to enhance vision), I propose an analogous concept of teichoacoustics in the Greek and Roman worlds –using walls as a technical means of sounding and hearing; that is, transmitting and receiving auditory sensation. I focus on four cities and their walls: Babylon in the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (via Ovid, Shakespeare, and the Beatles); Troy during the Trojan War, especially Helen’s visit to the city walls in Iliad 3; Thebes, from the creation of its walls through music to its depiction in tragedy; and finally Delphi and the musical inscriptions on the external walls of buildings there. While the particular media functions of sound vary at each of these different sets of walls, these examples demonstrate a number of productive relations between sound and walls, and suggest possibilities for a practice of listening to architecture – both figuratively and literally – as a way of excavating cultural memory in and about antiquity.

In the parodos of Aristophanes’ Frogs, the entrance of the mystic chorus is preceded by its chant of Ἴακχ’ ὦ Ἴακχε, | Ἴακχ’ ὦ Ἴακχε (316–17), the same cry that was traditionally voiced in the Iacchus procession from Athens to Eleusis during the Great Mysteries. It is the aim of this contribution to peel back the emotional and cognitive layers of what may have been the first audience’s response to this religiously, politically, and historically significant sound. What did the theatrical mimesis of this ritual vocalization, which for several years prior to the play’s production in 405 BCE had been “muted” due to the Spartan occupation of Attica, make the Athenian audience think, feel, and remember? To answer this question, philological and historical methods of inquiry native to classical studies as well as cross-cultural perspectives drawn from sound, religious, and memory studies are employed. A central argument is that Aristophanes’ evocation of the Iacchus cry gives sonic expression to the cultural and political nostalgia and longing that inform Frogs, in particular, nostalgia for the Athenian-led victory over the Persians at Salamis.

Metrical patterns reveal that in Roman Comedy music and memory worked closely together. Roman audiences had distinct and clear memories of music they had heard in the theater. Plautus and Terence, in patterning the music of their plays, relied on spectators’ memory of earlier music in the play they were watching, musical conventions of the genre, and specific musical moments in earlier plays, and they employed music in ways reminiscent of the reprises and other techniques of musical repetition in American Musical Theater. The importance of musical memory is particularly evident in Plautus’ Amphitruo, where metrical repetition reveals four different musical motifs, surrounding, respectively, the play’s iambic senarii, trochaic septenarii, iambic octonarii, and bacchiacs. Each motif works because spectators would remember music from plays they had seen before and from previous scenes in Amphitruo itself. In each case Plautus’ play with musical memories contributes to the generic uncertainty surrounding this unique tragicomoedia, helping to make clear that in fact Amphitruo transcends all the generic categories with which its audience would be familiar.

This chapter surveys archaic and classical Greek ideas about music and memory. It first asks why song-producers and audiences, while readily acknowledging the effectiveness and value of music’s verbal components as preservers and enhancers of memory, do not seem to recognize the purely musical elements as being especially “memorable.” Second, I turn toAristotle, seeking to piece together how he thinks music – along with “voice” and sounds in general – functions in relation to memory, primarily through the psychological-somatic workings of the human “imagination,” i.e., his notions of affect (pathos) and phantasia. Even while Aristotle does not address musical memory directly, his work provides a sophisticated account of the material and physiological processes whereby hearing and memory operate in humans and other animals – adumbrating modern accounts based on a more accurate understanding of neurology and cognition. At the same time, since ancient music was experienced live (rather than through recordings or broadcasts) and could never be exactly repeated, there existed a different relationship between present and past in music-listening than most of us are used to today.