As the shepherds of Mount Parthenius knew all too well, the transformation of an animal is central to making an ancient Greek lyre. As Hermes said to that first ill-fated tortoise, ‘if you die, then you shall make sweetest song’ (Hymn. Hom. Merc. 38). From Spencer Klavan, readers new to ancient Greek music will learn that Greek lyric poetry is so called because it was originally sung to the lyre (lyra) (6–7). Pauline LeVen’s book offers a rich, challenging and very enjoyable exploration of how ancient Greek and Roman writers explored the connections and boundaries between music and the natural world through myths of metamorphosis. Not only was the tortoise musical, but so too cicadas, nightingales, reeds and more besides.

Since the mid-1980s Greek music has been a subject in bloom, but it remains relatively inaccessible for those without access to a university library. New projects like the Repertorium Musicorum Instrumentorum Antiquorum (RIMAnt), a planned database of all known ancient Greek and Roman musical instruments (https://rimant.hypotheses.org), will help to open up the subject, as will more introductory and popular treatments.

Starting with Klavan’s book, there has been a very limited number of accessible, up-to-date, introductions to ancient Greek music. Martin West’s Ancient Greek Music (Oxford 1992) and John Landels’ Music in Ancient Greece and Rome (London 1999) fill the English-language market, alongside Andrew Barker’s more specialized two-volume Greek Musical Writings (Cambridge 1984 and 1989). There is also the new Blackwell Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music (Hoboken 2020), which is thorough and up-to-date, but less affordable.

At just 159 pages, Klavan keeps his readers engaged and shows how something as potentially obscure and difficult as ancient music can be made relevant to anyone interested in modern music or ancient history. The book is divided into nine short chapters: 1 ‘Introduction: Origins and Beginnings’; 2 ‘How Music was Made: Instruments and Songs’; 3 ‘Where Music Happened: Venues’; 4 ‘Education’; 5 ‘Politics’; 6 ‘The Cosmos’; 7 ‘Tunes’; 8 ‘Rhythms’; and 9 ‘Beyond Greek Music’. The text is complemented with ten black-and-white figures.

The first five chapters introduce readers to core topics and evidence. Chapter 6 on Pythagorean ideas about the music of the spheres is more of a surprise. Klavan neatly shows how what can seem like a hopelessly odd way of looking at the world inspired Kepler’s Harmonices mundi (Linz 1619), and compares ancient ideas of music and harmony to Newton’s Second Law of Motion and Einstein’s theory of relativity as some of the ways in which humans have historically used mathematics to try and understand the rules that govern the universe. Klavan’s book is full of these helpful comparisons, allowing readers to understand some of the different cultural and philosophical values tied to music in antiquity. Readers will find references to Lil Nas X alongside J.S. Bach (39), and Damon of Athens’ thoughts on culture and politics are paired with those of Percy Shelley and Andrew Breitbart (71). Another important aspect of Klavan’s book is that he questions what we mean by ancient Greek music, noting multidirectional cultural exchanges ranging from ancient Anatolia to al-Farabi’s Kitab al-Musiqa (The Book of Music).

Chapters 7 and 8 are guides to understanding what ancient Greek music sounded like. To introduce pitch, intervals and scales, Klavan has readers sing familiar tunes (‘Somewhere over the rainbow’, ‘Here comes the bride’ and ‘Happy birthday’). Syllables and rhythm are explored by recalling the chorus of the ‘Battle hymn of the republic’ (likely more familiar to American readers) or saying out loud ‘I wish I never saw your stupid face’ before moving onto the first lines of the Odyssey. This allows readers with absolutely no prior music theory or ancient Greek to, by the end of Chapter 8, be in a position to understand and even sing the earliest complete notated melody in the world, the Seikilos Song. This short four-line carpe diem tune calls on the passersby to ‘shine … have no grief, none at all …’. Seikilos is the name of the dedicant and composer, and his song is part of an inscription from a tombstone from Aydın, Turkey. The stele dates to the second century CE and is kept in the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen (14897). The song can sound slow and mournful, or optimistic and lilting. Ancient Greek musical notation leaves important elements of performance (such as tempo and dynamics) open to the interpretation of the performer. A joyful version performed by Stef Conner and Barnaby Brown at the 2018 MOISA conference can be found on YouTube.

A condensed treatment of Greek music means that some important issues are elided or misrepresented slightly. One area that falls a little flat is the archaeology of ancient Greek music. Klavan’s brief overview of the Louvre aulos is informed by Stefan Hagel’s publication of the instrument (‘Better Understanding the Louvre Aulos’, Studien zur Musikarchäologie 9 (2014), 131–42), but in the further reading, there is no reference to it. Klavan claims that this aulos (Louvre E10962) is ‘made of an African wood which the Greeks called lōtos’ (28). But we do not know what wood was used to make the Louvre aulos (a xylological analysis is being planned, I am told). The misattribution seems to have snuck in because Hagel used Celtis australis wood (what we think the Greeks meant by lōtos, though this is debated) to make his replica of the Louvre aulos. It may well be that the maker of the Louvre aulos made it from lōtos wood, but they might have used sycamore, boxwood or even olive. We will have to wait to find out.

This is where a review of a book ‘designed specifically for students and teachers at late school and early university level’ (blurb) will invariably draw criticism. Footnotes can be off-putting for general readers, but it is a shame that some work cannot be referenced. Klavan’s second sentence refers to the Mesolithic depictions of dance seen in the Addaura cave in Sicily. Klavan and I both heard an excellent talk in 2018 by Paola Budano on the Addaura cave dance scenes at a workshop on ancient music that we had been involved in organizing (now published: ‘The Addaura Cave: Dance and Rite in Mesolithic Sicily’, Open Archaeology 5.1 (2019), 586–97). Sadly, with no footnotes the work of junior colleagues, or work on relevant but adjacent topics, will often not be referenced.

Nonetheless, the overall accessibility of this book is to be highly commended, including its references to websites and YouTube videos. If interest is piqued (and I am sure it will be), the further reading providing by Klavan will enable countless hours of delving deeper.

If grumbles about lōtos, sycamore, olive wood and citations seem somewhat tangential to what ancient music is really about, LeVen’s tour de force blasts away our anthropocentric understanding of music and runs through its labyrinthine passages, guiding the reader with a red thread of posthumanism that takes us past ‘biomusicology’, Donna Haraway’s ‘natureculture’, Jacques Attali’s ‘human-machine-interface’ and Bernie Krause’s ‘great animal orchestra’ (D.J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago 2003); J. Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis 1985); B.L. Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (New York 2012)).

LeVen’s careful engagement with differing theoretical perspectives is one of the major reasons why this is such an important volume. It stands out as one of the most excitingly novel examinations of the aesthetics and being of Greek and Roman music that I have read in a long time. Chapter 1 serves to ‘establish how [musical metamorphosis] myths … resisted a more dominant view of the world that cut the human off from the nonhuman’ (12–13) and this is subtly reinforced in the headings of the following chapters: Ringdove (2), Cicadas (3), Echo (4), Reeds (5), Nightingale (6) and Beetle (7), rather than Phatta, Syrinx, Philomela, etc.

The topics of LeVen’s book are variegated and each chapter examines a particular facet of these musical metamorphoses that stands on its own. This means that readers should not expect to be bombarded by Ovid. Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe features prominently, and authors ranging from Achilles Tatius to Xenophanes make appearances (all usefully included in an index of citations). LeVen’s book will find a wide range of readers among those interested in Imperial literature, musicology, ecology, philosophy and many other disciplines too (all extended passages of Greek and Latin are translated). For example, despite focusing on literary evidence, many of LeVen’s conclusions are relevant for how we interpret the material culture of music in the Greek and Roman worlds. Her chapter on Syrinx will be of great interest to anyone thinking through the traditional dichotomy of humans (subject) and musical instruments (object), a dichotomy that LeVen roundly rejects: ‘Pan’s kiss is an acknowledgment of the continuity of vital matter, of the constancy of the flux of life as zoe between animal and vegetal … The breath of the god does not so much animate an inert object as unite an existing life, for by blowing upon the reeds as he kisses them he creates a melody’ (162).

To appreciate these metamorphoses fully, we need to decentre music and agency as purely human things. Depending on where you already sit on the matter, LeVen might have a fair bit of persuading to do. Traditionally, music has been used to distinguish humans from other animals and living things. As Charles Darwin put it (not unproblematically, given the influence of race science on his discussion): ‘As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man … they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he [man] is endowed’ (The Descent of Man (1871), Vol. 2, 333: see A. Saini, Superior (London 2019), chapter 2). Moving away from a history of anthropocentric inquiry into music (ancient or otherwise) does not mean that the fields of New Materialism and Posthumanism from which LeVen approaches the topic are not without criticism. Taken to an extreme, these schools of thought can dehumanize or excuse dehumanizing behaviour (see for example, M. Fernández-Götz, D. Maschek and N. Roymans, ‘The Dark Side of the Empire: Roman Expansionism between Object Agency and Predatory Regime’, Antiquity 94 (2020), 1630–39). While LeVen decentres the human, this is never at the expense of dehumanizing the forms of male violence that are part of these musical metamorphoses, for example. Responding to Milla Tiainen (‘Sonic Performance and Feminist Posthumanities: Democracy of Resonance and Machinic Sound’, in C. Asberg and R. Braidotti (eds), A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities (Cham 2019), 103–15), LeVen shows us how ‘Echo can thus be seen as an icon not just for posthumanist thinking but specifically for posthumanist feminist thinking’ (135).

The next time you sit down at a piano or have a little boogie, listen to the tweeting of birds or the sound of cars on wet roads, have a think about what ancient Greeks and Romans would have made of this music; there’s certainly lots that we can learn from them: Kavlan’s book will guide you through the basics, LeVen’s will challenge your preconceptions.