Satyr statue playing music

Music was the satyrs' birthright. Marsyas the satyr challenged Apollo to a contest of flute against lyre and lost his skin for the impudence; the satyr Pan invented the syrinx from a reed; Silenus, the elder satyr who raised Dionysus, was depicted by Plato in the Symposium as a being whose music could move stones. The musician-satyr in sculpture stands for the wild edge of music itself — the side that goes beyond the formal scales and reaches into the older rhythms of the natural world.