The Teacher of Dance

Abstract

The De musica of Aristides Quintilianus, an author and music theorist unknown apart from this treatise, presents several tantalizing claims about the relationship between dance and the three sciences of mousikē: i.e., harmonics, metrics, and, most importantly, rhythmics. Elliptical as his remarks on dance may be, if they are taken together with his treatment of the musical phenomena as essentially governed by systēmata, both a technical discourse around dance can be elicited from the evidence as well as the philosophical and aesthetic reasons why such a discourse was so modestly developed in comparison with the three sciences attending to musical phenomena. I conclude that the theorist considers the dancing body to be only minimally conformable to the systēmata imposed on bodies by the Platonic demiurge’s art, almost as a leimma unassimilable to the perfections of musical order, and yet somehow orderly enough to be treated according to their proportional order.