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Choruses, Ancient and Modern

Cover of 'Choruses, Ancient & Modern', title in turquoise against a white background and Pablo Picasso's ceramic 'Quatre danseurs'
Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh
2013
About

Choruses, Ancient and Modern examines the ancient Greek chorus and its afterlives in western culture. Exploring the choral tradition from archaic Greece to the present across a variety of different media, the volume thematically juxtaposes perspectives on choruses to create a dialogue between ancient and modern contexts. The contributions discuss the chorus's place within scholarship, aesthetic and philosophical perspectives, reflections on absences, and its social and communal potential. Each section considers antiquity and modernity in counterpoint, at once de-familiarizing ancient contexts of the chorus and defining crucial moments in modern choral traditions. 

Publisher
Oxford University Press
See the volume on the OUP website
  1. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, ‘Theorising the Chorus in Greece’ 
  1. Simon Goldhill, ‘The Greek Chorus: Our German Eyes’ 
  1. Constanze Güthenke, ‘The Middle Voice: German Classical Scholarship and the Greek Tragic Chorus’ 
  1. Ian Rutherford, ‘Chorus, Song, and Anthropology’ 
  1. Felix Budelmann, ‘Greek Festival Choruses in and out of Context’ 
  1. Helen Slaney, ‘Seneca's Chorus of One’ 
  1. Roger Savage, ‘Something like the Choruses of the Ancients: the Coro Stabile and the Chorus in European Opera, 1598-1782' 
  1. Joshua Billings, ‘An Alien Body? Choral Autonomy around 1800’ 
  1. Martin Revermann, ‘Brechtian Chorality’ 
  1. Sheila Murnaghan, ‘The Nostalgia of the Male Tragic Chorus’ 
  1. Christian Biet, ‘A Senecan Theatre of Cruelty: Audience, Citizens, and Chorus in Late-Sixteenth and Early-Seventeenth-Century French Dramas’ 
  1. Cécile Dudouyt, ‘Phantom Chorus: Missing Chorality on the French Eighteenth-Century Stage’ 
  1. Laurence Dreyfus, ‘Sunk in the Mystic Abyss: The Choral Orchestra in Wagner's Music Dramas’ 
  1. Zachary Dunbar, ‘How do you solve a problem like the chorus? Hammerstein’s Allegro and the Reception of the Greek Chorus on Broadway’ 
  1. Richard Seaford, ‘The Politics of the Mystic Chorus’ 
  1. Edith Hall, ‘Mob, Cabal, or Utopian Commune? The Political Contestation of the Ancient Chorus 1789-1917' 
  1. Fiona Macintosh, ‘Choruses, Community, and the Corps de Ballet’ 
  1. Eleftheria Ioannidou, ‘Chorus and the Vaterland: Greek Tragedy and the Ideology of Choral Performance in Inter-War Germany’ 
  1. Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Revivals of Choric Theatre as Utopian Visions’ 
  1. Helen Eastman, ‘Chorus in Contemporary British Theatre’