According to the theory of Jan (1992) and Aleida Assmann (1999), the concept of Cultural Memory refers to a category of collective memory which can survive for centuries, being externalized, objectified, and stored in symbolic forms through institutional means. The maintenance and interpretation of that memory is assigned to a certain authority figure of a given society (like a priest, a shaman, an archivist, an historian, or an institution) that is responsible for keeping the stability, the faithfulness, and the coherence of a group memory. Consequently, that process builds forms of cultural memory that are transmitted not only by written texts, but also by other media like images/iconographies, audiovisual works, oral transmission, sculptures, etc.

The Attic pottery, for instance, can be a valuable source for analyzing how the Musical Performances are represented in ancient Greek iconography, as symbolic forms that reflect a Cultural Memory of the aspects and details of the musicians' performances. Besides this theoretical approach, other fields of knowledge as the “ancient soundscapes” (Emerit, Perrot, Vincent, 2015) and “archaeoacoustics”, that may be improved with the use of new technologies (Hagel, 2022), also offers different kind of analysis of the ancient performances, in spite of the limitations of the archaeological record. Therefore, this paper intends to propose an interdisciplinary dialogue between these fields through the iconographical analysis of Attic vase paintings that represents performances of musical competitors. In that case, I select three vases of sole musicians singing and playing the kithara (kitharoidos): the pseudo-Panathenaic amphora attributed to Pan Painter in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (n. 20.245, ca. 470 BC); the neck-amphora by the Brygos Painter in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (n. 26.61, ca. 480 BC); the pseudo-Panathenaic amphora attributed to Berlin Painter in the Louvre Museum (MNE 1005, ca. 490 BC).