Reconstructing the Sound of Ancient Greek Music

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Megaterio Llamas
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Reconstructing the Sound of Ancient Greek Music

Postby Megaterio Llamas » Fri Apr 16, 2021 3:43 am

I thought this was an interesting story, if you're interested in this sort of thing:

So Now We Know What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like


In 1932, the musicologist Wilfrid Perrett reported to an audience at the Royal Musical Association in London the words of an unnamed professor of Greek with musical leanings: “Nobody has ever made head or tail of ancient Greek music, and nobody ever will. That way madness lies.”

Indeed, ancient Greek music has long posed a maddening enigma. Yet music was ubiquitous in classical Greece, with most of the poetry from around 750 BC to 350 BC – the songs of Homer, Sappho, and others – composed and performed as sung music, sometimes accompanied by dance. Literary texts provide abundant and highly specific details about the notes, scales, effects, and instruments used. The lyre was a common feature, along with the popular aulos, two double-reed pipes played simultaneously by a single performer so as to sound like two powerful oboes played in concert.

Despite this wealth of information, the sense and sound of ancient Greek music has proved incredibly elusive. This is because the terms and notions found in ancient sources – mode, enharmonic, diesis, and so on – are complicated and unfamiliar. And while notated music exists and can be reliably interpreted, it is scarce and fragmentary. What could be reconstructed in practice has often sounded quite strange and unappealing – so ancient Greek music had by many been deemed a lost art.

An older reconstruction of ancient Greek music:


A project to investigate ancient Greek music that I have been working on since 2013 has generated stunning insights into how ancient Greeks made music. My research has even led to its performance – and hopefully, in the future, we’ll see many more such reconstructions.

Russian Archaeologists Unearth Oldest Known Fragments of Greek Musical Instruments
Song of Seikilos: Oldest Known Musical Composition Lay Hidden on a Flower Stand in Turkish Garden
Ancient Greek Theater and the Monumental Amphitheaters in Honor of Dionysus
Explanation and renditions of the latest reconstruction of ancient Greek music:




read the rest of this article here: https://www.ancient-origins.net/history ... ic-0010481
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