A history of music with every example dead

Claim (verbatim)

The pseudo-Plutarchan De musica is antiquity's surviving history of music - a dialogue digesting the lost musicological literature (Glaucus of Rhegium, Heraclides) into a roll-call of the tradition: Terpander and the kitharodic nomoi; Olympus and the auletic; Clonas, Polymnestus, Thaletas; Sacadas, whose Pythikos nomos painted Apollo's serpent-fight in programmatic movements; Archilochus' rhythmic innovations; the new-music revolutionaries Melanippides, Cinesias, Phrynis, Timotheus, Philoxenus, Telestes. It is a canon in which every work is dead. The treatise names dozens of musicians with their signature compositions, and the modern reader can hear none of it: nothing it names survives with notation, and its named compositions survive as text only in stray quoted lines, if at all. The mechanism: music historiography arose precisely because the repertoire was already slipping - the treatise's sources wrote to fix a fading performance tradition in prose - so De musica is not a window onto the music but a certificate of its loss, antiquity's own admission that description had replaced sound. Measuring its names against the surviving corpora converts the certificate into a number: a canon whose survival-with-music rate is zero and whose survival-as-text rate is a rounding error. (The lone celebrated nomos text, Timotheus' Persae, reached us by one buried papyrus, outside the quotation channel, and without its music - the exception that maps the rule.)

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: enumerating the musicians and named compositions in pseudo-Plutarch's De musica, the treatise will name at least 25 distinct musicians and at least 10 distinct named compositions or nomos-types, of which exactly zero survive with musical notation in DAGM or its supplements (primary clause: the 0-notated-of->=25-named census; the verdict follows it), and fewer than one in five of the named compositions will survive as continuous quoted text in Page's Poetae Melici Graeci; each musician counts once, from the treatise's text in a standard edition; the test voids if the naming census cannot reach 20 musicians.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: pseudo-Plutarch, De musica (Ziegler's Teubner or Lasserre's edition) for the name census, scored against Page's Poetae Melici Graeci for text survival and Pöhlmann-West's corpus for notated survival - a name-by-name survival scoring with a zero numerator on the music side.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That the De musica's canon is melodically dead is the commonplace of every introduction: Lasserre's edition studies the named masters - Terpander, Olympus, Sacadas and the rest - precisely as lost figures, and Barker's annotated translation registers throughout that their works survive at best as titles and stray quotations. But the pinned census - a >=25-musician, >=10-composition enumeration scored name by name against the notated corpus and against Page's Poetae Melici Graeci for quoted text, with a <1-in-5 text-survival rate - was not located as ever having been run as a table, and its zero clause turns on census adjudications (which names count as musicians, whether any notated tragic excerpt attaches to a treatise-named figure) that no publication has fixed.

• F. Lasserre, Plutarque: De la musique (Olten & Lausanne, 1954), edition with studies of the named musicians
• A. Barker, Greek Musical Writings I: The Musician and his Art (Cambridge, 1984), annotated De musica translation
• M.L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), on the lost archaic repertoire

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.