This book is a very welcome addition to the growing bookshelf of new work on the history of sound. A symptom of the still limited number of sound-studies titles aimed specifically at Classicists is to be found in the fact that, after this reviewer accepted the commission of this review, the reviewed author himself published a (kind) review of the reviewer's own recent monograph in the same field. But if the cross-talk is still in its early stages, it shows every sign of engaging a widening number of Classicists and of connecting to a similarly expanding field of sound studies (and sense studies) in the broader theoretical humanities and beyond.
The publication of G.’s monograph, along with recent work by S. Nooter and P. LeVen, puts the study of sound in Greek literature on a firm (or, rather, agile) theoretical footing. Despite initial appearances, G.’s book has the feel of a tightly organised extended essay. The text proper runs to 139 pages, comprising an introduction (‘Capo’) that spells out G.’s questions and methods and then adumbrates three areas of inquiry, each of which then receives its own chapter: ‘Figures’, ‘Affect’ and ‘Music’. A very brief concluding ‘Coda’ is followed by nearly 100 pages of notes and bibliography, which by their bulk signal the density of the argument that has occasioned them and the extent of G.’s direct engagement both with Greek literature and with a wide range of theoretical interlocutors.
The annotating, in fact, begins in earnest already in a four-page ‘Prologue’ that precedes all of the above. This consists of a staccato catalogue of ancient sounds, both real and fantastic, drawn mostly from the literary works to figure in what is to come. A total of 185 endnotes tells us where G. has sourced each sound he describes, offering what I take to be a deliberate parody of the kind of philological heavy-lifting it is going to take to get Classicists to listen to what has been there to hear all along, just beneath their noses (as it were). G. summons this symphony out of an initial silence that provides his first sentence: ‘It is only ever silent at night’. True? Here the footnote acknowledges the complication of bat-sounds and, more worryingly, the lack of any clear-cut discussions of nocturnal silence in Greek (though G. fills in the gap with some Virgil). But the fact is that there never really has been a time or place in which the night was anything more than differently noisy (if relatively quieter) than the day. The simplification is an early symptom of G.’s tendency to see black-and-white contrast where it would be better to look for shades of grey, despite repeated assertions that he aims ‘to steer a middle course’ (p. 9).
The ensuing introduction, ‘Capo’, nevertheless, quickly reveals G.’s command of the stakes of sound studies, both generally and in particular application to ancient literature. From the latter, he offers a couple of initial exhibits from Sappho (including fr. 2, which has become something of a locus classicus in work on ancient sensation); along the way, G. conjures, with disarming ease, key insights on sound from psychology, cognitive science, linguistics (R. Jakobson understandably gets top billing here) and other fields. The chapter is sure to be received, deservedly, as a rallying cry for more work of the sort about to be attempted. Still, some will struggle to pin down just what G. is saying about why sound should matter to the student of Greek literature. That it does matter has long been clear to some readers at least: indeed, one thing that Nietzsche certainly gets right in The Birth of Tragedy is sound's importance to that genre, a point again made in more recent memory and in similar terms by N. Loraux in The Mourning Voice (2002). G. gives Nietzsche a nod on the first page of his introduction as someone ‘with whom my argument has much in common’, and though he also signals a departure from the philosopher's dualisms, his own readings regularly fall back on the ready-made contrast invoked at the end of his prologue: ‘In Greek auditory aesthetics, sound is summoned as the antithesis and disruption of the order that summoned it’ (p. 4). In other words, what G. mostly will hear in his ancient material is an age-old battle between (linguistic) sense and (extra-linguistic) sound, with all manner of forces of order aligned with the former. That the Greeks heard the same seems clear (arguably once any culture understands language as the ordering of sound, the rest follows almost inevitably), as is the fact that the most artistically minded of them, like G. himself, enjoyed this battle mostly when it remained messy and unresolved. On this latter score, part of what makes G.’s book such an engaging read is his commitment to art and to artists, ancient and modern, with the musical avant-gardes of the last century getting several shout-outs (though not much more) and the poems of the distant past treated seriously as sound art. Nevertheless, this commitment does not always keep him from trying to make sound be about something other than itself, which, for this reader at least, slightly short-changes the initial promise of his approach.
That analogic tendency is very much on display in the first of G.’s principal chapters, ‘Figures’, which for this very reason is one of the book's most accessible, and one I certainly look forward to assigning to students. Indeed, the chapter reads a bit like the transcript of a brilliant graduate seminar, with G. taking up text after text (from Homer to Aristophanes, with mostly lyric in between) to show us how to read for sound, both as represented in the poem and as embodied sonically by the poem. Sound, though, is always sound-symbolism: it matters because it can be yoked to the linguistic and narrative logic of the text.
The reader who finds this disappointing, however, gets far more satisfaction from the next chapter, ‘Affect’, concerned most memorably with tragedy. Tracking sound as it slips in and out of language, across space, between characters and even through the fourth wall, G.’s close readings are virtuosic and intense, emboldening him to claim, ‘This is the tale of tragedy: terrible sounds invade and almost overcome – almost – dramatic form, resonating uncannily within the curved space of the theater’ (pp. 82–3). The one thing I missed in G.’s otherwise thrilling readings was adequate attention to the pleasures of performance. The (sonic) tale of opera, we might say, is no less terrible than that of tragedy, but the comparison reminds us that terrible sounds can be wonderful – indeed, beautiful – to hear.
Performance is instead an important prompt in G.’s final chapter, ‘Music’, in which his deft unleashing of the sounds of Greek texts (Pindar is a centrepiece, and the finale returns to tragedy) achieves a crescendo. Sound still always seems to mean something constituted by its opposition to something else, but the sides are always shifting positions and even swapping places; even Nietzsche's aulos/lyre dualism becomes magnificently porous. G. comes into his own here, offering a model for what sound work on sound can do.
G.’s ‘Coda’ offers a belated effort to replace the key of ‘structure and opposition’ with one of ‘a nascently ecological impulse’ (p. 134). Such a move would have been more productive had it been made, forcefully, in the book's overture and sustained as a motif throughout. But this only means that one looks very much forward to any sequel. Encore!
