Talk:Classical reception studies

History of Reception

Hi all, I just made some changes to this article as part of a WikiScholar class! Please let me know if there are any changes I've made that are not in line with any community standards, be they Wiki or Classics-specific. I hope to expand on this article, but I'm not quite sure where to go-- is it better to discuss the field itself and its development, which I have started but could leave as a summary, or better to outline some of the timelines (reception in antiquity, middle ages, etc.) or media (film, music, etc.)? My hunch is that film and popular culture today would be of greatest interest to laypeople, but of course, that's not necessarily true, nor perhaps is that the most persuasive argument. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. Any advice is helpful! Thank you. Mshuang2 (talk) 14:46, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Hey, how interesting you chose this topic, because I am working on two articles related to late Renaissance and early Baroque lute and guitar music. In the day, musicians elevated the lute because they imagined it descended from the ancient Greek kithara -- even though the kithara was actually a kind of harp, and the lute was really descended from the medieval Arab oud. I have always been struck by how 16th-century musicians repurposed ancient Greek ideas about music to support their own quite different practices. Woodycolahan (talk) 02:36, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Very cool, Woody! It's funny to imagine how many things may have been inspired by a Greek or Roman counterpart, but we lost the trail and now just think of it as an original invention. At my old institution, we had a 5th century choir book, but we couldn't ever figure out how to "translate" their notation into something we could play. :) Mshuang2 (talk) 15:44, 20 August 2019 (UTC)