Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece

By Sean Alexander Gurd

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780823269662

Book preview

Contents

Note on Sources and Citations

Prologue

Capo

1. Figures

2. Affect

3. Music

Coda

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Note on Sources and Citations

References to ancient sources are abbreviated according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition). Sources of ancient texts are noted the first time they are cited. Translations are my own. I use the following abbreviations:

Campbell    Campbell, D. A., ed. and trans. Greek Lyric. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982–1993.

DK    Kranz, W., and H. Diels, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Zürich: Weidmann, 1966.

FGrH    Jacoby, F., ed. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin: Weidmann, 1923–1959.

IEG    West, M., ed. Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989–1992.

LIMC    Ackermann, H. C., J. -R. Gisler, and L. Kahil, eds. Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae. Zürich: Artemis, 1981.

LP    Lobel, E., and D. L. Page, eds. Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.

LSJ    Liddell, H. G., R. Scott, and H. S. Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

PCG    Kassel, R., and C. Austin, eds. Poetae comici Graeci. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983–.

PMG    D. L. Page, ed. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

TrGF    R. Kannicht, S. Radt, and B. Snell, eds. Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–2004.

Dissonance

Prologue

It is only silent at night.¹ The rising sun sets the air popping and sizzling,² and other voices rise in chorus with the ambient hum. Goats and sheep bleat,³ cows raise a clamor,⁴ bulls bellow,⁵ horses’ hooves thud⁶ and their nostrils snort,⁷ wild boars gnash their teeth and squeal,⁸ dogs bark⁹ and growl¹⁰ and whine,¹¹ pigs raise a ruckus.¹² Deer,¹³ lions,¹⁴ serpents,¹⁵ and bees¹⁶ make themselves heard. Cicadas sing,¹⁷ as do birds¹⁸: you can hear the cries of eagles,¹⁹ the song of the nightingale,²⁰ and the singing, shouting, and noise of cranes,²¹ herons,²² hawks,²³ crows,²⁴ falcons,²⁵ swallows,²⁶ owls,²⁷ cocks,²⁸ swans,²⁹ cuckoos,³⁰ quails,³¹ starlings, and jackdaws.³² Water murmurs,³³ chatters,³⁴ and roars.³⁵ The ocean’s³⁶ waves crash against the shore³⁷ and reverberate.³⁸ Rivers rush together and rumble;³⁹ streams shout out⁴⁰ and their banks resound.⁴¹ The wind⁴² speaks⁴³ shrilly.⁴⁴ A rock crashes down a slope and through the forest.⁴⁵ The earth is split by thunder.⁴⁶

Where there is sound, there is danger, disruption, agony, or worse. You can hear war.⁴⁷ Armies on the march resound like the sea⁴⁸ or make the earth groan,⁴⁹ their voices rising like the din of flocks,⁵⁰ birds, or flies,⁵¹ or like the shout of a god.⁵² Led by the war trumpet,⁵³ they thunder together like waves⁵⁴ or rivers⁵⁵ or rolling stones⁵⁶ or fire⁵⁷ or wind;⁵⁸ they shout⁵⁹ like birds of prey.⁶⁰ Bowstrings whine and sing.⁶¹ Hand-to-hand combat sounds like the thud of woodcutters felling trees in the forest.⁶² Soldiers fight gnashing their teeth like boars.⁶³ Armor crashes and clatters as weapons strike out and soldiers fall.⁶⁴ Captured cities shout with the mixed voices of victors and vanquished;⁶⁵ their towers crash to the earth,⁶⁶ and the babies of slaughtered mothers wail.⁶⁷ Bodies thud⁶⁸ to the ground and groan.⁶⁹ Backs creak.⁷⁰ Bones bark.⁷¹ The ghosts of the slain gibber and whine.⁷²

What terrifies does so with an open mouth and a strong voice.⁷³ One of the offspring of the monsters Echidna and Typhaon is a canine creature called Orthos (Shrill);⁷⁴ Cerberus, a second product of the same coupling, is bronze-voiced.⁷⁵ A serpent killed by Apollo gasps and hisses as it dies.⁷⁶ The sisters of Medusa lament her death, their voices rising in serpentine cacophony.⁷⁷ The cyclops Polyphemus, a savage⁷⁸ and irreligious⁷⁹ creature whose name means he of many voices, enters the Odyssey with a crash, throwing his bundle of firewood onto the floor of his cave with a thunderous din;⁸⁰ after milking his goats (who bleat as they are serviced),⁸¹ he addresses Odysseus and his crew in a terrifying voice.⁸² At dawn the next day, he leaves whistling loudly.⁸³

Out beyond the edges of civilization, Odysseus hears other terrifying sounds. The courtyard of the house of Aeolus, keeper of the winds, resounds;⁸⁴ the murderous Laestrygonians raise themselves against Odysseus with a shout that runs through the town,⁸⁵ and the rain of rocks they send down on his ships causes a din.⁸⁶ The singing of Circe⁸⁷ is juxtaposed with the voices of swine;⁸⁸ later, when Odysseus compels her to release his crewmen from her spell, they crowd about him lamenting, and the house echoes.⁸⁹ The spirits in the underworld throng noisily about him,⁹⁰ while around the shade of Heracles a clamor arises, as of terrified birds.⁹¹ The clashing rocks roar with the surf they churn up,⁹² as does the sea around Charybdis;⁹³ the sea groans in the vicinity of Scylla,⁹⁴ who barks in reply.⁹⁵ When his comrades kill and cook the cattle of the sun in contravention of sacred law and Odysseus’s command, the meat bellows on its spits;⁹⁶ their immediate punishment is a shrieking gale from the west.⁹⁷

Sound indicates that a body has fallen ill.⁹⁸ The throat can hiss,⁹⁹ make a rough scratching noise,¹⁰⁰ or croak;¹⁰¹ sometimes these attributes are combined and a hoarse whistling can be heard.¹⁰² Breathing can become perceptible, as though the patient were choking.¹⁰³ Many respiratory noises are caused by an obstruction in the lung or windpipe due to unexpectorated pus¹⁰⁴ or a growth.¹⁰⁵ Coughing clears the lungs; when it fails to do so, the upper cavity becomes congested and begins to make more morbid sounds.¹⁰⁶ An inflamed lung brings pain, together with a gurgling sound not unlike what one might expect from a stomach.¹⁰⁷ A certain Bilus was wounded in the back; breath escaped noisily from the wound.¹⁰⁸ When the lung is phlegmatic, the chest seems to sing.¹⁰⁹ When it falls against the rib, there is a sound like that of leather.¹¹⁰ When water collects in it, if you apply your ear for a long time and listen to the sides, it seethes inside like vinegar.¹¹¹ Pus rolls and splashes around. One medical author describes what happens when a large amount of phlegm runs out of the head into the upper cavity: as it grows infected, it flows down onto the diaphragm and makes a splashing sound against the ribs.¹¹² Chest and abdomen alike rattle¹¹³ and rumble.¹¹⁴ From the lower cavity, we hear noise,¹¹⁵ dins,¹¹⁶ bellowing,¹¹⁷ roaring,¹¹⁸ and gurgling.¹¹⁹ Eating and drinking cause sound in the chest and intestines;¹²⁰ beneath that, there are the rumblings caused by bowel movements¹²¹ and flatulence during sex.¹²²

Even the voice is a result of violence.¹²³ For Anaxagoras, it comes into being when the breath falls against the solid air and travels to the hearing from the resounding of the blow.¹²⁴ Other theorists have similar ideas. Democritus claims that the air is broken into similar-shaped bodies and rolled along by the strikings of the voice.¹²⁵ These are healthy voices; sick ones learn a different type of music. They are muffled,¹²⁶ hoarse,¹²⁷ rough (as though there were fat in it),¹²⁸ a lower pitch than normal,¹²⁹ shrill¹³⁰ or high-pitched,¹³¹ broken,¹³² soft,¹³³ weak,¹³⁴ tremulous,¹³⁵ or choked.¹³⁶ Raving and talking nonsense, especially with fever, indicate phrenitis or melancholia and, in more than a few cases, death.¹³⁷ For one doctor, an uncharacteristically bold reply in a high-pitched voice is an indication that the hypochondrium is drawn tight; the prognosis is not good.¹³⁸ It is possible to recognize things that are not equally clear among the healthy, writes another, by listening to the voice and the breath with your ears.¹³⁹

Tragic voices, coming from psychic as well as physical agony, warp out beyond language, producing uncanny, overwhelming cries: ἂ ἄ,¹⁴⁰ ἒ ἔ,¹⁴¹ αἰαῖ,¹⁴² ἀταταῖ,¹⁴³ ἐλελεῦ,¹⁴⁴ ἠέ,¹⁴⁵ ἠή,¹⁴⁶ ἰού,¹⁴⁷ ἰώ,¹⁴⁸ ὄ,¹⁴⁹ ὀᾶ,¹⁵⁰ οἴ, οἰοί (the syllable can be repeated freely),¹⁵¹ ὀτοτοτοῖ (again with a syllable that can occur any number of times),¹⁵² παπαῖ (also repeatable),¹⁵³ ποποῖ,¹⁵⁴ τοτοῖ,¹⁵⁵ τοτοτοῖ,¹⁵⁶ φεῦ,¹⁵⁷ ὤμοι, and ὤ.¹⁵⁸ At the outer limits of speech, the voice can imitate the sounds of animals: the lamentatory, ever-repeating and yet ever-varying Ἰτῦς Ἰτῦς of the nightingale;¹⁵⁹ the ἐποποποῖ ποποποποῖ ποποῖ, ἰὼ ἰὼ ἰτὼ ἰτὼ ἰτὼ ἰτώ;¹⁶⁰ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιό;¹⁶¹ τριοτὸ τριοτὸ τοτοθρίξ;¹⁶² οροτοροτοροτοροτίξ; κικκαβαῦ κικκαβαῦ; τοροτοροτοροτορολιλιλίξ¹⁶³ of Aristophanes’s city of birds. Likewise the outlandish sounds of foreign speech, especially Persian melding with Greek.¹⁶⁴

As the voice, so the soul. Penelope compares her aggrieved mind to the music of the nightingale.¹⁶⁵ Odysseus, debating whether to kill his maidservants right away or bide his time and kill them later, has thoughts similar to a dog standing over her pups and growling;¹⁶⁶ Nestor’s thoughts roar like the heaving sea with the shrill winds above it.¹⁶⁷ A woman maddened by infatuation hears the bellowing of a deer in her heart.¹⁶⁸

Natural sounds, too, come from the violent unsettling of otherwise placid physical configurations. Anaxagoras explains thunder as the result of the descent of hot ether into wetter, moister clouds; the result is a flash of lighting followed by a sizzle (σίξις).¹⁶⁹ (The earliest use of the verb σίζω [sizzle] is in the Odyssey, where it is used to describe the sound of the Cyclops’s eye receiving Odysseus’s burning stake.)¹⁷⁰ Or else thunder comes from violent quasi-bodily sounds: in a parodic theory attributed to Socrates by Aristophanes, when the clouds are full of water they roll around, snore (ῥήγνυνται), and make loud noises (παταγοῦσιν), just like a body that has eaten too much: παππὰξ παππάξ· παπαπαππάξ· παπαπαππάξ.¹⁷¹

In the midst of all this din, there is the sound of song. Κλεός, the poetic glory of heroes, is loud.¹⁷² Poets describe the thud of dancing feet¹⁷³ and the sound of singing,¹⁷⁴ as well as the auditory characteristics of song genres such as the paean,¹⁷⁵ hymns,¹⁷⁶ the ololuge,¹⁷⁷ bacchic song,¹⁷⁸ and lamentation.¹⁷⁹ Musical instruments have distinctive sounds; we hear castanets,¹⁸⁰ horns,¹⁸¹ auloi,¹⁸² lyres,¹⁸³ the many-stringed magadis,¹⁸⁴ and the syrinx.¹⁸⁵

They well up, these sounds, and resonate in every corner of Greek culture, coloring narratives and structuring enunciations, blooming within stories and songs. And yet they are only partly desired—or, better, they are both desired and not, desired because they are not desired. In Greek auditory aesthetics, sound is summoned as the antithesis and disruption of the order that summons it. And where sound is, there will be the work of art.

Capo

In the four centuries leading up to the death of Euripides in 406 BCE, Greek poets, singers, and theorists tracked sound’s movement over wide expanses of space and time, contemplated its use as a communicator of information, calculated its power to express and cause extreme emotion, and explored its possibilities as a plastic material. Their Greece was loud—and hence radically estranged from what I suspect are widely held but rarely acknowledged assumptions. Only theology offers fantasies of purity and permanence as powerful as the classics. The classical age seems to be a frozen world, a world we can contemplate as though we were the enchanted speaker in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, for whom the silent stillness of an ancient vase symbolizes the survival of truths more lasting than the generations of humankind. Critiques of such dreams have never been lacking.¹ One thinks especially of Nietzsche, with whom my argument has much in common,² although rather than opposing Dionysus to Apollo or irrational experience to the logos, I set the sonorities of Greek song against any longing for silent forms that might tease us out of thought/as does eternity.³

During these more or less four hundred years of early European cultural history, a link was made between noise and art that has also been made, with increasing insistence, in the music and sound art of the last century or so. Just as contemporary music involves noise at a fundamental level of its operations,⁴ so, too, did musicians in the early centuries of Greek culture make a consistent effort to incorporate sound in their works. Like that of their modern counterparts, again, their work often disturbed widely held beliefs about the relationship between sound and culture. Because of their commitment to creating sensuous artistic presences through the disruption of shared cultural expectations, something more than the everyday protocols of making meaning are demanded when we turn our ear to their works, and in the research for this book I therefore proposed to listen, that is, to pause in the midst of aesthetic experience and take the time to feel.⁵ But I had the sense that to do this was hardly to revel in blissful, beautiful experience and that any aesthetic pause would be more like a mode of openness to turbulence than a form of stillness and peace. My suspicions were confirmed: Greek auditory artworks clear an unsettling space for the vibrations that we call sound but that are, at base, one front along which human bodies interface passionately with the world.

Psychologists who study perception insist that hearing serves as a point of transition between physical vibrations and cognitive identifications—between a presensual material field and a postsensual world of noetic objects. Noetic is not usually used in the psychology of perception, but contemporary neuropsychology is residually Kantian, and it is generally accepted that the experience of sound is a cognitive event related to, but different from, the physical vibrations that stimulate the sense. As Michael Levine puts it,

Perception refers to the way in which we interpret the information that is gathered (and processed) by the senses. In short, you sense the stimulus but you perceive what it is. Here you enter the realm of another branch of psychology: cognitive psychology. . . . Perception includes the more cognitive processing by which you develop an internal model of what is out there in the world beyond your body.⁶

In the service of perception, cognition suppresses sensation, which resides as an independent neuro-physical system of interactions beneath the threshold of awareness.⁷ A similar process takes place in the cognition of speech. When I speak, my vocal folds vibrate and shift in length and tension, and my jaw, tongue, teeth, and lips are in continuous motion. I move my vocal tract to articulate phonemes and words—but stable sounds are not what I make. Consonants and vowels overlap and interact, each running into the next and influencing its articulation. Acoustically, no two utterances of the same phoneme are alike, even when they come from the same speaker. This perpetually fluctuating stream of sound occurs physically as a complex series of pressure waves.⁸ We do not perceive these waves; we convert, segment, and abstract from the series of their impacts until the illusion of an ordered sequence of linguistically significant sound units emerges. Speech, in other words, is the consequence of an act of interpretation in which both the complex physical base and its equally complex processing are suppressed.

What psychologists and psycholinguists track in the emergence of perception can also be followed in the humanities, where sound has become a social value, an entity with a history inseparable from its techno-political contexts. One of the founding documents of the current sensual turn, Marx’s much-cited 1844 statement that the cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history,⁹ sets the tone. Such an insistence on the historicity of the senses required a bracingly radical perspective on human self-awareness. To have insisted that perception was not merely a transparent, naive, or mechanical communication from an inert outside to a passively perceiving inside but, rather, was determined by interactions between an active consciousness and historical social environments historicized even intuitive certainty—a move many historicisms still hesitate to make, at least explicitly. Mistrust of the senses is an inheritance of Platonic metaphysics, firmly enshrined in modern thought thanks to the self-interrogations of Descartes. But unlike his predecessors, Marx did not turn away from, bracket, or seek to transcend perception; rather, he turned toward it, seeing it as thoroughly steeped in its historical moment and playing a role in the still-to-come self-fulfillment of humanity. This was radical because, in the end, it is not the cogito that grounds certainty for most of us but the percipio—usually we feel our existence because we feel, not because we think. Historicizing the senses meant questioning a level of experience where questioning barely seems possible.

Marx’s point was that our being is less important than our becoming. On his account, the senses were not simple sensors responsible for communicating brute or material facts to thought. Mere sensation, for example the smell of bread to a starving man, communicates only the most abstract meanings. Marx thought the senses could be made concrete in so far as both they and their objects became human. The socio-technological self-realization of humanity so central to Marxist thought progressed in two directions at once: toward the refinement of the cognitive realizations of sense and toward the deployment of sensible objects in a more fully humanized social environment—so that the smell of bread is not simply the smell of offered or refused nourishment but the smell of a social system of food manufacture and distribution, of yeast and grain and ovens, capable of being enjoyed because it speaks of a collectivized and just society. Note, however, that this is all about perception, not sensation: Marx’s basic thesis, after all, is that what matters happens in social and economic history, not at the neuro-physical interface.

When literary scholars approach the problem of sound, the results are similar. Consider Paul Valéry’s much-repeated description of poetry as an eternal hesitation between sound and sense [‘sense’ means ‘meaning’ in this context].¹⁰ Roman Jakobson thought this hesitation was a consequence of what he called the poetic function: the ability of some language-use to draw attention to the communication itself.¹¹ It did this, Jakobson thought, by projecting the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.¹² When I speak, he maintained, I select my words from horizontal stacks of (quasi-)synonyms; this is the axis of selection. Selection assumes a semantic near-identity between the words I have to choose from (the principle of equivalence). Once I have picked my words, I combine them in a syntactical sentence; this is the axis of combination. In poetry, the axis of combination is subjected to the principle of equivalence usually only prevalent on the axis of selection. So, for example, in a line of quantitative verse all long syllables are treated as metrically identical, and as a result, a rhythm emerges in the line. Jakobson extended his analysis beyond structuring features like meter, identifying further examples in figures of speech like paronomasia. As a result, poetic language use could be said to foreground or emphasize sound as a constitutive element: the relevance of the sound-meaning nexus is a simple corollary of the superposition of similarity on contiguity.¹³

But the projection of the principle of equivalence onto the axis of combination occurs at the level of syllables or phonemes, which are linguistic and objects of perception rather than sensation. Thus, for example,

[t]he reiterative figure of sound, which Hopkins saw to be the constitutive principle of verse, can be further specified. Such a figure always utilizes at least one (or more than one) binary contrast of a relatively high and relatively low prominence effected by the different sections of the phonemic sequence.

Within a syllable the more prominent, nuclear, syllabic part, constituting the peak of the syllable, is opposed to the less prominent, marginal, nonsyllabic phoneme. Any syllable contains a syllabic phoneme, and the interval between two successive syllables is in some languages always and in others overwhelmingly carried out by marginal, nonsyllabic phonemes.¹⁴

All this talk of binary contrasts, of syllabic and nonsyllabic phonemes contributes to the definition of poetic language as the result of procedures of linguistic cognition (at least as structuralism understands it). The sound of poetic language in Jakobson’s discussion is mediated, in other words, by linguistic circuitry. Indeed, Jakobson’s goal was not, in the end, to explore the sensual presence of sound in a poem. It was, rather, to draw attention to the functioning of language as such, that is, to construct the object of linguistic science. The relationship between (cognitively constructed linguistic) sound and (cognitively constructed linguistic) meaning facilitated an archeology of the linguistic object, not a phenomenology of sensation and still less an aesthetic.

It is, indeed, extremely difficult not to refer sensation to some other field; just as one interprets a loud roaring sound to be thunder, so is one inclined to understand hearing as a function of technique, society, economics, or ecology. Thus, for example, we understand that it is because they have learned to do so that modern city dwellers habitually ignore sounds with amplitudes so great that humans living before the Industrial Revolution would have associated them only with catastrophic environmental disasters;¹⁵ because it is learned, tolerance of such noises can be explained as an expression of cultural causes. Claims that the experience of sound is determined by sociocultural factors effectively suppress sensation and replace it with other causes. Such acts of suppression are well grounded in the sense that they are analogous to, and perhaps even modeled on, the distinction between sensation and perception fundamental to our everyday being in the world. But they are not exhaustive. It is true that I perceive sound objects at the expense of the sensory stimuli themselves. But there is a level of experience at which, in perceiving such things, I also sense them. I do not want to argue that I have access to immediate sensation. But I do want to acknowledge that there is a stratum of awareness within consciousness, and a vocabulary within language, that can communicate about sensation, and I want to draw the inference that the enclosure within which perception takes place is porous, at best; an absolute and closed system of perception would place me in a world of objects without awareness of the mediation of sense—just as a closed system of social meanings would allow me a plenitude of significance and a minimum of disruptive presences.¹⁶ That sensual awareness seeps into consciousness through almost every seam is what makes it possible for me to get lost in the play of light on the side of a building, the luxurious grain of a wooden table, the overwhelming power of late Coltrane. These things cannot be experienced without cognition and culture, but neither cognition nor culture determines them completely. I seek, then, to steer a middle course between unreflective realism and overachieving constructivism by locating the auditory neither in physical reality nor in cognitive or cultural constructions, but in the disruptive backflow between these two regions.¹⁷ I think sound happens when the material order percolates through the sociocultural order and, vice versa, when the sociocultural opens itself to disruption by the material. And I think this takes place especially in works of art.

It is no accident that most of the best writing on sound has been engaged with sound art, noise music, and cognate practices; art plays a crucial role in articulating sensation for culture.¹⁸ This is probably to be expected from all forms of technical production that are not totally constrained by preexisting patterns and imposed teleologies: in such contexts a maker, lacking a goal at the outset, has no choice but to seek out a final form by feel, and it might come as no surprise that the consequence should give a form to feeling.¹⁹ But ancient Greek auditory art seems exemplary. Songs in this tradition repeatedly made sound perceptible, not merely forming it but drawing attention to it, not merely manipulating it but also proffering it as a presence.

Indeed, for the period I study here, song performed a vital service in doing this work, because no other construction existed to house auditory experience. To be sure, there were multiple words for it, each of which captured a fragment, large or small, of the broader field. But no single idea stabilized the realm of sound or metabolized it into a coherent and clearly defined field. It was not a matter of consensus how the ear worked or what its relationship was to the soul. And while gradual agreement did emerge over some of the more crucial points of acoustic theory (e.g., that sounds are caused by some sort of percussive event, and that they are propagated and heard by something like resonation or reverberation), a unified concept may not have existed before the mid-fifth century and a widely accepted account only emerged, gradually, in the fourth.²⁰

It is arguable, in fact, that nothing had a concept before whoever it was first posited universals and linked these to intellection—Plato, probably, if not Socrates or Pythagoras. The imperative to grasp things together (to produce a con-ceptum) or to be able to address them head on as one thing (καταγορεύειν, to accuse, to address under the censure of law, and, thus, to categorize), was institutionalized and fiercely propagandized in the philosophical schools of the fourth century BCE and later. If conceptualization happened before then, it did so in a way that left little mark in Greek writing: it was either beyond the horizon of the durable material we have to work with or beneath the threshold of consciousness. These reflections make it immediately clear why it will not do to substitute some putatively ancient category for the modern one of sound. When we listen to what was happening on the other side of the curtain dropped by Western metaphysics we hear a world resistant to the procedures of categorization—any categorization, regardless of its familiarity or historical provenance.

I do not want to say, exactly, that the absence of a single category for auditory phenomena means that before the work of metaphysics there were nothing but singular perceptual events, an unreduced multiplicity of physico-neural encounters untamed by any category or concept. In important ways, nothing could be more false. Prephilosophical thought was able both to gather the auditory as a group of related events and to make links between objects and subjects. But it did so nonconceptually, through highly elaborate auditory art, which took the form of sung poetry, or, more simply, song. It has long been argued that poetry plays a role in forming, recommending, and discarding words, metaphors, and syntactical formations—from Horace through Shelley and Mallarmé the creation and maintenance of language has been a not-so-unacknowledged mandate of the poet.²¹ But art can also find, frame, stage, and sound out new forms of sensual experience, and it can push old ones to their limits. It is along this avenue that I approach the ancient auditory—not as a history of concepts or ideas but as a history of the sensations produced and explored in technical media. Songs played the role of lab reports or dispatches from liminal regions where sense was actively explored and created. A song was a claim: I heard (it) this way.²²

This worked, paradoxically, because the culture in which Greek poets and composers operated consistently aligned the presence of sound with the overturning of order. In Hesiod’s mythico-social imaginary, for example, corrupt judges caused the goddess Justice to raise a loud noise,²³ and this tendency to take sound as an indicator that something had gone terribly wrong, that peace and contentment were endangered, was entirely typical. Most of the sounds in texts composed between the eighth and fourth centuries emanate from places or events associated with violence and disruption; we hear from nonhuman animals, monsters, violent upheavals of nature or war, and corrupt political leaders. An anthropological or aesthetically naïve reading of the database of sounds stored in the texts of this period would be hard-pressed not to conclude that in Greek culture there was an opposition to make Lévi-Strauss smile; society, culture, and peace were on the side of silence (or at least of radically controlled, cooked sound), while monsters, the wilds, and war roared with raw noise.²⁴ But song violated this opposition in a fundamental way, countering social expectation with auditory disruption and creating a vital dissonance, thanks to which sound itself became almost impossible to ignore.

Dissonance—the Greek word is διαϕωνια, its antonym συμφωνία, consonance—names the palpable presence of an enduring difference. Two notes are musically consonant if their sound waves combine to produce a single wave of nonfluctuating amplitude, a consequence of the fact that their fundamental and lower overtone frequencies are in simple harmonic ratios. Notes in a dissonant relationship produce a combined wave with sensible variations in amplitude: neither their fundamentals nor their partials coincide, and the result is extra audible information in the form of beats or roughness, a richer, grainier, less-polished sound. Supervenient on conflict, dissonance could be called an enhancement of the audible: it is a perception whose subject is sense itself. Similarly, Greek auditory art consistently performed the self-contradictory gesture of equating itself with social order and resonating with the sounds of social disorder. One result was to raise the amplitude of auditory sensation to the point where it, too, proved perceptible.²⁵

The orientation to sound found in