MOISA EPICHORIOS: REGIONAL MUSIC AND MUSICAL REGIONS IN ANCIENT GREECE MOISA EPICHORIOS: MUSICA REGIONALE E REGIONI MUSICALI NELL'ANTICA GRECIA (Moisa – International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage IIIrd Annual Meeting IX International seminar – Le musiche dei greci: passato e presente. Valorizzazione di un patrimonio culturale) RAVENNA, ITALY, 1-3 OCTOBER 2009 Sala conferenze Dipartimento di Storie e Metodi per la Conservazione dei Beni Culturali Via degli Ariani, 1 - Ravenna, Italy

The Greeks were acutely aware of the regional diversity in their music and performance cultures. Profoundly tied to religious practices and expressed in myth, ritual and image, local and regional musical traditions were intricately intertwined with the construction of cultural identities, and linked to social structure. At the same time, Greek mousike was embedded in a culture of mobility: music and musicians travelled the Mediterranean crossing the boundaries of local and social fragmentation, linking the dispersed Greeks in a web of exchange. Thirdly and perhaps as a consequence, innovation and distinctions of musical idiom, such as instrumentation or tuning, harmony, mode, articulation, rhythm etc. were often associated with particular geographical regions and the social set-up of these places. The aim of the conference is to investigate the dynamic resulting from this configuration and explore its role for the construction of identity of different varieties. Often, but not always oppositional, these identities take the study of Greek music for the first time beyond the framework of the polis: Boiotians seek regional unity through the construction of a musical culture in the service of the Boiotian league, profoundly Apolline and un-Dionysiac. For the Arkadians mousike is the touchstone of social cohesion in the rugged mountainscape of the inner Peloponnese. Islands express their otherness in discrete musical imagery reflecting the experience of maritime mobility and connectivity in an insular cosmos. Similarly, musical forms appear as a product of social interaction in the Greek world: places competed for the origins of new musical forms, as for example Korinth, Thebes or Naxos for the dithyramb. The legend of Arion suggests that the dithyramb’s invention was a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon, a product of maritime mobility and contemporary social change in the archaic period. Many musical and dramatic innovations in and around the early City Dionysia at Athens were reputedly introduced from outside, reflective of how social innovation and musical import were mutually dependent. Perhaps this is also why drama was often perceived not exclusively as an Athenian, but rather as a Hellenic performance mode. The construction of musical geographies and local regional performance cultures was intimately linked to constantly self-renewing political identities in a historical milieu undergoing continuous and rapid social change – perhaps one reason why the Greeks engaged in a constant process of retelling and revising their musical past. Some issues are shared with the anthropology of music in the modern and contemporary Mediterranean: the focus on local and regional identities interacting with continuously changing social structures on the one hand, an overarching framework of the performance culture across the Mediterranean on the other. We hope to engage recent approaches in modern studies for the ancient Mediterranean, not least exploiting the notional borders of the Greek world, in Italy, Thrace, the Black Sea, Anatolia and the Phoenicians. The Greeks and the civilisations around them did not have a conception of a Mediterranean identity, a relevant feature of the study of the music of the modern and contemporary Mediterranean; but one might ask whether constant contact and exchange did help to construct the Mediterranean as a shared cultural and musical space.