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Abstract

This article provides a survey of recent scholarship on music and dance in the cults and rituals of ancient Greece and Rome, with a focus on work that explores the experiential aspects of worship music. I review research on cultic and ritual soundscapes; the materiality and phenomenality of ritual sound; special modes of visually and aurally perceiving cultic mousikē; the epiphanic potential of sacred music; ways of remembering, recording, reenacting, reperforming, and reexperiencing ritual musical performances within and beyond the parameters of cult. I also propose some further avenues of inquiry into each of these topics. Other approaches to religion and music are discussed as well, in particular the sociopolitical contextualization of cultic choreia that has remained a dominant interpretive paradigm over the past two decades.