Aulos and Audience in the Ancient Greek Musicscape

Fall 2021 Grant Recipient

Graduate Student

Abigail Bradford (Art) Performance spaces are critical to understanding how spectators experience music. In recent scholarship there has been an interest in reanimating ancient Greek music by reintroducing live musical performances back into ancient theaters. Through this reanimation scholars are developing an increasingly nuanced understanding of the multisensory dimensions of ancient musical performance and are, in a way, breathing life back into ancient sounds. This project examines the sound transmission of the ancient woodwind aulos at six ancient theaters on mainland Greece to reconstruct the multisensory dimensions of ancient musical performance and to understand how music may have been experienced by spectators throughout the ancient Mediterranean.