About

Pauline LeVen is a Professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of Music at Yale University, serving as Chair of the Humanities Program. Born in Monaco and raised in France, she studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Sorbonne, and Princeton University, earning a joint PhD in 2008. She was a Fulbright student and the Phi Beta Kappa Sibley Fellow in Greek Studies. LeVen is a literary critic and historian specializing in ancient Greek literature and musical culture. Her first book, The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, examines Greek songs from around 440 BC to 320 BC, combining close textual analysis with cultural context to explore the vibrancy of musical culture during the late classical period. Her second book, Music and Metamorphosis in Greco-Roman Thought (2021), investigates narratives about animal and natural phenomena in Greek and Roman thought, focusing on aesthetic and ontological reflections through stories involving music and transformation. In 2023, she co-edited the first volume of the six-volume Cultural History of Western Music, which aims to foster dialogue between Classics and musicology. Currently, she is working on a monograph titled Greek Poetry and the Anthropocene, analyzing lyric poetry's engagement with non-human matter, and a short book with Sean Gurd, The Musician in Nine Greek Myths, exploring the social history of ancient music through mythic figures. Her research encompasses Greek literature, poetry, musical culture, imperial literature, and posthumanities, with recent courses on ancient musical thought and Greek literature.

Research topics

• Aesthetics
• History
• Literature
• Art
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Communication
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Performance Ghosts, Identity, Ontologies

  2023-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Imagining ancient music in performance is a bit like dancing with ghosts: we might have a good sense of what the phenomenon of mousikē (that is, music, song, and dance) was like in antiquity, but pinning down its precise contours all at once is impossible. Several types of ancient material provide i

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• Technologies From Minds to Machines

  2023-01-01

  otherSenior author

  In everyday speech, “technology” refers to things like microwave ovens, automatized assembly lines, internal combustion engines, electric motors, and electronic communications. In music, we might think of instruments, microphones, synthesizers, and sound recording devices. It certainly would be poss

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• Introduction

  2023-01-01

  otherSenior author

  It is said that the music of Graeco-Roman antiquity is lost. In a limited sense, this is true: there is no significant “literature” in the form of playable scores (the entire musical remains of more than a thousand years of music can be played through in a single performance). But it is also true th

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• The New Music

  2022-05-06

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Cicadas: On the Voice

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • History
  • Philosophy

  Before we turn to the larger debates, a few words about the myth of the cicadas in its narrative context. The story is recounted at a turning point in the Phaedrus, as Socrates moves from the three speeches on love that have so far occupied him and his conversation partner, Phaedrus, to the examination of rhetoric and the value of writing that will engage them to the end of the dialogue. The reference to the cicadas is at first puzzling. It is not the first time, of course, that Socrates comments on their natural surroundings; earlier in the dialogue, he remarked on the countryside setting, which “echoes in a clear-sounding and summer-like way the chorus of cicadas” (θερινόν τε καὶ λιγυρὸν ὑπηχεῖ τῷ τῶν τεττίγων χορῷ, 230c). But it is striking that he turns his attention to the environment at this precise point in the text, and that he takes his cue from the insects and tells the myth of their origin when he had concluded from the earlier observation that “countryside and trees cannot teach [him] anything” (τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν … ἐθέλει διδάσκειν, 230d). How can this be accounted for? This oddity has brought one of the major commentators of the Phaedrus to consider the cicada myth a “relaxing intermezzo.” Others, however, have proposed to take “listening to the cicadas” as the leitmotif of the Phaedrus, or to interpret the myth in the light of the main questions explored in the dialogue: as a reflection on the nature of the soul, as a celebration of musical eros, as a form of psychagogia, as a reinterpretation of the Pan myth, or as a presentation of different types of response to sensible beauty. Most commentators in fact have analyzed the myth by reflecting on its function in the context of the dialogue, and explained it in light of the rest of the Phaedrus.

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• Pan and the Music of Nature

  2020-06-26 · 2 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought

  2020 · 39 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Literature
  • Art

  Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamorphosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with 'contemporary' debates – contemporary with debates in the Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.

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• Reeds: On Musical Objects

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • Aesthetics

  All Greek musical instruments have aetiological tales associated with their creation, and the syrinx (or panpipes) is no exception. A detailed account of the origins of the musical object appears in three texts: a passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.689–723), a mythical narrative embedded in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (2.34), and the version quoted above from Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Clitophon. As with the rest of our stories, no link of imitation or subversion between different narrative versions of the myth can be established, since the dates of each of the narratives are so uncertain. All we can say is that the three narratives are similar in their basic scenario, but differ in their details and emphasis. These different narrative versions of the myth constitute elaborate (and sometimes discordant) meditations on aesthetic and ontological issues related to the musical instrument and the experience of listening to its sound.

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• Echo: On Listening

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-11-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Instead of a text, a blank space opens this chapter. For only a blank space, locus desertus, is the proper spot to encounter Echo, to reflect on her essence, and experience the play of presence and absence in the visual and aural realms. Although not a part of the nonhuman world like an insect, a plant, or a stone, Echo and her myth actually deserve to figure in our catalogue of metamorphic stories perhaps more than any other creature. For Echo is a figure of the natural world that brings up the most fundamental question that this book is concerned with: that of the relationality between listener and sound, between human animals and the nonhuman world, and between matter and ideas.

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• Doing Philosophy in the Elephant’s Mouth:

  Barkhuis eBooks · 2019-02-28 · 15 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Felix Budelmann

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Yale College Prize for outstanding…