In the four centuries leading up to the death of Euripides, Greek singers, poets, and theorists delved deeply into auditory experience. They charted its capacity to develop topologies distinct from those of the other senses; contemplated its use as a communicator of information; calculated its power to express and cause extreme emotion. They made sound too, artfully and self-consciously creating songs and poems that reveled in sonorousness. Dissonance reveals the commonalities between ancient Greek auditory art and the concerns of contemporary sound studies, avant-garde music, and aesthetics, making the argument that "classical" Greek song and drama were, in fact, an early European avant-garde, a proto-exploration of the aesthetics of noise. The book thus develops an alternative to that romantic ideal which sees antiquity as a frozen and silent world.
About the AuthorSean Alexander Gurd is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is the author of Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology and Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome.
Reviews"Dissonance is an impressive achievement. Gurd is clearly highly conversant with the entirety of the ancient Greek literary tradition." -- -John T. Hamilton Harvard University
Book InformationISBN 9780823269655
Author Sean Alexander GurdFormat Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Fordham University PressPublisher Fordham University Press