New Music and Early Peripatetic Scholarship

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting a preliminary survey of Peripatetic statements about the so-called ‘New Music’ as a significant turning point in musical history, addressed by most of the main exponents of the Peripatos as part of a wider engagement in the study of µουσική. The establishment of a ‘history of music’, whose main phases are represented by its origins, its development through Archaic and Classical times and, eventually, its corruption into a ‘degenerated’ musical style, is crucial in the Peripatetic foundation of µουσική as a scholarly field of enquiry and is inherited by later sources that rely largely on Peripatetic materials, namely the pseudo-Plutarchaean De musica.