Ancient Greek music (jan 1, 75 BC – jan 1, 0)

Description:

Ancient Greek music has been a riddle researchers haven’t been able to solve for a long time. Most of the poetry from 750 BCE to 350 BCE (Homer, Sappho, etc) was performed as sung music, sometimes with dancing involved. Literary texts contained a lot of information about the composition of the music and the instruments used to produce it, but since all the terms used were complicated and unfamiliar to us, we couldn’t make heads or tails of it. What was reconstructed in practice sounded weird and not music-like, so many considered Ancient Greek music lost. The instruments used in Ancient Greek music include an older version of the lyre, and the aulos (imagine if you played 2 different flutes at the same time, the aulos is like that). A project investigating this music uncovered new information. The rhythm in Ancient Greek song was based on the duration of syllables in the words in order to find the rhythmical basis, with long and short sounds following each other. For example, a long sound and then 2 short ones (daaa-da-da). With this revelation and the others made, a chorus was constructed of Euripides’ Orestes and performed in its original Ancient Greek form (It’s beautiful). They have also clarified that Ancient Greek music is the probable root of European musical tradition.

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