Emily Pillinger – författare

Musical as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity investigates music as a site of classical reception from the early modern rise of opera to contemporary hip-hop. The volume's contributors explore topics across musical genres and classical sources--myth, epic, lyric, history, philosophy, archaeology--to demonstrate the enduring importance of music to engagements with classical antiquity, and vice versa. The wealth of music inspired by ancient Greece and Rome rests on an apparent paradox: compared with visual art, linguistic texts, or even material culture and architecture, precious little remains of ancient music, and what traces have remained are not audible in any straightforward sense; nonetheless, classical antiquity has provoked and permitted an extraordinary variety and volume of musical receptions. This edited collection offers case studies of the generative encounter between antiquity and later music makers, but also asks how new sounds are imagined as emerging from near-silence. Can a reception not only echo the past, but make the past louder, turning up the volume on what is currently muted or inaudible? In short, what does it mean to amplify antiquity? The volume proposes amplification as a new model for reception studies with relevance to the wider field, as a set of technologies, a rhetorical technique, and a sonic concept. Drawing on classics, music, sound studies, literary studies, and intellectual and cultural history, the chapters explore three different modes and contexts of reception: musical settings of ancient words; musical reimaginings of ancient lives, ideas, and myths; and the expansive and sometimes oblique encounters with Graeco-Roman antiquity that are powered by electric amplification and the media changes that come in its wake.

This book explores the miscommunications of the prophet Cassandra - cursed to prophesy the truth but never to be understood until too late - in Greek and Latin poetry. Using insights from the field of translation studies, the book focuses on the dialogic interactions that take place between the articulation and the realization of Cassandra's prophecies in five canonical ancient texts, stretching from Aeschylus' to Seneca's Agamemnon. These interactions are dogged by confusion and misunderstanding, but they also show a range of interested parties engaged in creatively 'translating' meaning for themselves from Cassandra's ostensibly nonsensical voice. Moreover, as the figure of Cassandra is translated from one literary work into another, including into the Sibyl of Virgil's Aeneid, her story of tragic communicative disability develops into an optimistic metaphor for literary canon-formation. Cassandra invites us to reconsider the status and value of even the most riddling of female prophets in ancient poetry.