ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests a work of Aristoxenus, in which he treated favorably the disciplined compositional process of the exponents of arkhaia mousike and their archaizing emulators in his own day while denigrating the undisciplined creative choices made by the composers of the New Music and their followers. It aims to indicate the existence in the fourth century of a dedicated school or movement of reactionary "Neoclassicists". The "effeminate twittering" of the theaters recalls Aristoxenus' lament over the barbarization and corruption of the theaters. The Aristoxenian treatise entitled De musica is, in fact, cited explicitly in 15 1136c, immediately following the mention of Plato's proscription of the Lydian mode, as an authority on that mode's invention. Aristoxenus is clearly projecting his present reality of a fragmented, multifarious musical culture, full of stylistic and technical options, onto an idealized past. Aristoxenus borrows the conceptually rich Aristotelian term prohairesis to describe the logic of the ancient composers' creative process.
