Tracing Timbre in Ancient Greece Page 1 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Harvard University Library; date: 23 February 2022 Print Publication Date: Oct 2021 Subject: Music, Sound Studies, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Jun 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.013.23 Tracing Timbre in Ancient Greece The Oxford Handbook of Timbre Edited by Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding Abstract and Keywords This chapter investigates the timbral world of ancient Greece through a close analysis of particular types of sonic language in a selection of poetry and prose treatises, from Homeric epic to fifth-century BCE tragedy to the treatises of Aristotle and his school. By trying to locate this elusive category within accounts of music-making and sound more generally, it demonstrates not just the rich vocabulary for conveying different elements of an acoustic experience in the ancient Greek world, but the cultural valences of specific terms and images. In particular, the chapter shows how frequently the various auditory qualities that we might—however anachronistically—associate with timbre are as much social constructions as physical properties. Keywords: timbre, ancient Greece, ancient Greek music, Aeschylus, Aristotle, Edonians, Seven Against Thebes, De Audibilibus IN the twelfth book of the Odyssey, as Odysseus nears the end of his tale of adventures in the court of the Phaeacians, he describes how, tied to his ship’s mast, he heard the “hon ey-voiced” song of the Sirens. 1 The adjective he uses, meligērus, conveys the attractive nature of both song and singers, encapsulating the loveliness of the Sirens’ tune and their sexual allure. Such attractiveness also lies in the verbal content of their performance, as they entice Odysseus with their singing of past, present, and future. Yet “honey-voiced” also seems to denote a specific quality of their song: not so much its melody or content, but rather the liquid sweetness of the sound itself. This is an early example of musical description in ancient Greek literature that appears to refer to the defining aspect of a sound beyond its volume or pitch—to its color, texture, and affect, all of which tend to be embraced by our concept of timbre. We find no term for timbre in surviving Greek texts, and indeed as a category of sonic qualities it is a relative ly recent concept, only entering European musical discourse in the eighteenth century. 2 An exploration of timbre in ancient Greek culture, then, is a problematically anachronistic one, for it assumes some equivalences between our own ways of perceiving and describ ing sound and those within a culture that existed over two thousand years ago. It must al Naomi Weiss