VOCE E STRUMENTI IN ALCUNE "QUESTIONI DI ARMONIA" DEL CORPUS ARISTOTELICO

Section XIX of pseudo-Aristotle’s Problems provides a vivid testimony of reflections on singing and its relationship to musical instruments in the Peripatetic school during Aristotle’s life or not long after his death. Several problems in the collection deal with the theme of the difficulty encountered by singers in the performance of particular notes, the reasons for the difficulty, and how to overcome it. Other problems, using rather elliptical and not particularly transparent language, lead us to understand that ancient listeners may have organized two simultaneous melodic lines hierarchically. In general, these brief texts appear to have been created starting from specific musical listening situations and seem to presume the point of view of a common listener rather than that of a philosopher. Given the theoretical approach of most of the works about music that have survived from ancient Greece, this feature makes them a source of enormous musicological interest.