How did Ancient Greek music sound?
Every year, for about 10 years, I have spent a month's holiday in Greece, in the Cyclades, in Crete.
Visiting Greece, especially the more remote regions, is an experience that I recommend to everyone.
It is a journey into the past that only some regions of the world can still offer.
There are places in the Peloponnese where you can really breathe in the history. Lately I've been very interested in ancient (and not so ancient) Greek music.
It's not easy to find really original sounds (not heavy modernization) so this post is really welcome.
Thank you
I know this may just not be my cup of tea because I have the mind of an overly stimulated modern person... but that sounded awful.
An interesting question is how much of ancient greek music might be still with us (without being explicitly identified as such).
With the collapse of the ancient world and the spread of Christianity in the Eastern Med various elements of the Grecoroman civilization were actively supressed, but evidently not all (e.g. the language survived and evolved).
Some terminology around musical modes that developed in medieval Europe is attributed to ancient Greece but its not clear how close the musical connection between these two worlds.
On the other hand, Byzantine chant and a rich collection of folk musics are still practiced in the broader region and may be echoes of that earlier musical universe.
If you like this kind of stuff, you should listen to Peter Pringle singing the Epic of Gilgamesh while playing a reconstructed oud.
While the melodies/rhythms he uses are his creation, the words are from the epic itself which was itself 2000 years old by the time of Ancient Greece.
Someone in the video talks about Homer as though he were the author of the epics. My impression was that these epics came about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.
Maybe this idea was just put in my head by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? It’s a great book that was recommended to me by a HN comment last year.
Besides being all the more relevant in the age of non-conscious language models, the book also makes the case that Homeric epics were not created consciously. Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
Anyway, the video is neat, and it makes me all the more curious what it would’ve been like to hear one of these in 600 BC.
Interesting anecdote that I am not entirely sure is true, is that “classical music” genre got its name because music was the only art that we didn’t know how it was in Ancient Greece and Rome, where the term “classic” is usually applied to.
So, by the time people were rediscovering the music of Bach and that type of music was growing in popularity, people decided to use “classical” for that sort of music.
Related: Sid Meier used a modern rendition of the First Delphic Hymns to Apollo (the earliest known instance of recorded sheet music) as the background music in Civilization 3.
For another take on reconstructing ancient greek music, you should look at the work of Annie Bélis (mostly in french but she has a wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_B%C3%A9lis) and the musical ensemble - Kérylos - that she created https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHzK2yVKDmpWEC-igDSeOYg
"Founded at the beginning of the 90s, the Ensemble Kérylos, directed by Annie Bélis, is dedicated to Ancient Greek and Roman Music. It plays only authentic scores as accurately as possible, using instruments that are faithfully reconstructed."
If you like this video, you will probably also like Peter Pringle's The Epic Of Gilgamesh In Sumerian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
There's also Michael Levy who is composing new music for ancient instruments[1] as well as playing the oldest song "Epitaph of Seikilos" on a kithara[2]
[1] https://ancientlyre.com/ [2] https://michaellevy.bandcamp.com/track/epitaph-of-seikilos-c...
Reminds me of what my friend who studied classics said: that we don’t know for sure how Greek and Latin actually sounded like in ancient times.
Look at Greek composer and researcher Halaris also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3AbylWGjog&list=PL-7hwegJPk...
That performance around the 8m40s mark is truly impressive.
I'm really confused by the aulos... How does such a short pipe produce these low notes? By the looks of it I would expect it to sound two octaves higher.
Also check out modern recreations of the hydraulis.
A unique Ancient Greek instrument that was apparently the early forerunner of the organ.
Title should be "Rediscovering Ancient Greek Music (2017)"
Youtube for folks who prefer not to click twitter links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y
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In a similar vein, here is a performance of Beowulf in Old English accompanied by music from an Anglo-Saxon lyre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WcIK_8f7oQ Although I don't know how much of the performance style is reconstructed.
And that pipe music was fantastic. Reminds me a lot of the style of Colin Stetson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra-EsJpkG9o