The late fifth-century BC 'New Music Revolution' is often presented as a watershed in the history of lyric culture and one of its most significant features identified as the greater importance of aulos-music in song-and-dance performance. In this context, a series of lyric fragments are read as testimonies for a debate about this musical change: the poetic exchange between Melanippides (fr. 758 Page) and Telestes (fr. 805 Page) about Athena's mythical rejection of the aulos; a fragment of Telestes on the archaeology of aulos music; and a fragment of Pratinas (fr. 708 Page) condemning the supremacy of Music over Song in contemporary performance, all quoted by Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 14, 616e-617f). My presentation takes these fragments as a case study and reconsiders the link between lyric texts and 'historical contextualization' provided by Athenaeus. In addition to opening new interpretive possibilities for these lyric fragments, this study allows us to reevaluate our use of Athenaeus as source. In a close-reading of the Deipnosophistae passage, I show how the author's presentation of aulos-playing in the late fifth century is a literary montage of Aristotle's arguments on aulos-playing in book 8 of the Politics. Interpreting the lyric passages in the light of Athenaeus' remarks is thus to fall victim of a methodological vicious circle: the author's supposed 'historical contextualization' of the poems is actually the combination of his interest for the Peripatetics' socio-politics of music and his knowledge of, or access to, non-canonical texts. [p. 139]