The theme for 2023-2024 is “Ancient Musical Though,” with a focus on ancient China and ancient Greece, co-taught by Pauline LeVen and Mick Hunter.

This series examines the entanglement of music and musical thought in various forms of social, political, and religious behaviors across ancient cultures, with a particular focus on Greece (LeVen) and China (Hunter). Rather than focusing solely on musical practice or music theory, we ask how ancient thinkers made sense of music, and how they used music to make sense of the world. Questions we are interested in include, but are not limited to, the following: How did ancient thinkers understand the place of music within society, the ideal state, and the cosmos? What role did musical training and connoisseurship play in education? What musical forms were used for conceptualizing other ideas (political, metaphysical, religious…)? How was the relationship between music and wisdom represented? And how do the answers to these questions inform comparative study?