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Can we know what music sounded

like in Ancient Greece?
Armand D’Angour is associate professor
in classics and a fellow of Jesus College
at the University of Oxford. His books
include The Greeks and the New: Novelty
in Ancient Greek Imagination and
Experience (2011) and Music, Text, and
Culture in Ancient Greece (2018), co-
edited with Tom Phillips.

1,300 words

Edited by Sam Dresser

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Terracotta amphora, c490 BCE. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ey told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;

ey brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tiredTHIS
ENJOYED the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
ARTICLE?

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
Share Send to
A handful ofagreyfriend
ashes, long, long ago at rest, Explore more on
Music
Tweet 857 Still are
E mthy
a i l t hpleasant
is article voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take. Anthropology
Cultures & Languages

T his epigram by Callimachus, in a moving translation by the Victorian

poet William Johnson Cory, speaks of the timeless survival of
Heraclitus’ songs. Ironically, the poem is the only evidence of their existence:
the poet’s ‘pleasant voices’ must remain unsung. Most classical poetry,
spanning around four centuries from the songs of Homer in the 8th century
BCE to those of Aristophanes in the 4th century BCE, was in fact composed
to be sung to the accompaniment of musical instruments such as the lyre
and aulos (double-pipe). It was, in other words, music; but what did that
music sound like?  

Support Aeon Donate now Despite a wealth of ancient writings, archaeological remains of instruments,
and even inscriptions with musical notation, the question has long been
thought intractable. ‘Research into Ancient Greek music is pointless,’
pronounced Giuseppe Verdi in the 1880s. By the 1980s little had changed.
Recently, however, the subject has experienced exciting developments, with
credible realisations of musical scores and the remains of auloi being
accurately reconstructed and beautifully played.

at Ancient Greek poetry was song is clear enough in the case of the lyric
poetry of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE – the love poems of Sappho, the
odes of Pindar, and so on. ‘Lyric’ alludes to the lyre that accompanied
performances; the texts of the poetry are the ‘lyrics’ of lost songs. Such songs
featured in a wide range of activities from ceremonies to celebrations. e
choruses of Greek drama in the 5th century BCE also sang and danced, but
tragedies must now be studied solely as stage plays rather than musical
theatre – because the music is lost. 

But is it entirely lost? One fundamental component of music is rhythm, and

from ancient times Greek rhythms have been described and studied in terms
of ‘metre’. Greek words had long and short syllables, the former twice the
duration of the latter; one might represent them using half-notes and
quarter-notes. While terms like ‘dactylic hexameter’ (a dactyl is ♪ ♪ or ♩
♩♩ ) sound complicated, the six-measure phrase it represents can easily be
understood: 

What about melody and harmony? e philosophers Plato and Aristotle give
us long discussions of harmonic systems (‘modes’) and technically oriented
authors give precise descriptions of scales and pitches. Few people realise
that the Greeks also devised (around 400 BCE) two notations, one for
instrumental music and one for vocal. Tabulated by Alypius around the 5th
century CE, they have been known since antiquity. e vocal notation used
the Greek alphabet from A (alpha) to Ω (omega) to represent pitches from
high to low. Analysis of surviving songs and instruments allows scholars to
determine the range within which notes were pitched.

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When fragments of Greek musical notation on papyrus were first found in

the 16th century, therefore, Florentine scholar-musicians such as Girolamo
Mei and Vincenzo Galilei knew how to interpret them. But the scant
evidence gave them little grasp of the sounds of Ancient Greek music, and
they proceeded to create their own versions: opera and oratorio. Since then a
few dozen precious scores have been found: about 60 fragments survive on
papyrus and stone. e most substantial, inscribed on stone tablets at
Delphi, represent hymns by Athenaeus and Limenius dedicated to the god
Apollo, dated 127 BCE. 

e music of these documents follows not just the rhythm of Greek words,
but their melody. Ancient Greek was a pitch-inflected language: the voice
went up in pitch on particular syllables, as marked (from the 3rd century
BCE) by accent signs. e Greek for ‘song’, for instance, was mélos, with the
voice rising on the first syllable; while in kalós, ‘beautiful’, the second syllable
was pitched higher – ‘within the compass of a fifth’ according to an Ancient
Greek author. It makes sense that composers should respect the natural
melodic shape of words, and the musical documents confirm that
assumption.

eoretical treatises indicate that the earliest Greek music (700-400 BCE)
featured ‘enharmonic’ intervals smaller than a semitone, a practice that gave
way around 400 BCE to the wholesale use of whole-tone and semitone
intervals. In 1886 the philologist Rudolph Westphal declared that ‘the
Greeks’ non-diatonic music that admits intervals smaller than a semitone,
which are wholly foreign to the modern art, will probably, alas, remain for
ever an enigma to scholarship’. Accordingly, historians long dismissed the
notion that Western European music had its roots in Ancient Greece.
Instead, the consensus was that it derived from the Gregorian plainsong of
the 9th century CE, which in turn allegedly arose from the music of Hebrew
liturgy. More than a thousand years of Greco-Roman music seemed to have
left little trace on posterity – in retrospect an unlikely notion, but one barely
questioned. 

A papyrus fragment published in 1892, with music from Euripides’ tragedy

Orestes (408 BCE), posed a vexing challenge because of its use of quarter-
tones. New analyses of the fragment from 2012-16, however, led to striking
breakthroughs. First, it was recognised that the music uses a falling melody
to indicate dejection, and an interval leap to accompany the notion of
‘leaping’. is mimetic use of melody is not universal – it is not found, for
instance, in Far Eastern music – but is a marked feature of the European
musical tradition. Secondly, it was recognised that if the microtonal intervals
were understood as ‘passing-notes’, the harmonic structure of the piece was
no less tonal (as the ancient sources implied) than the 2nd-century BCE
hymns of Athenaeus or Limenius, which employ only whole-tone or semitone
intervals. irdly, an Ancient Greek commentator had noted that at the
climax of the verse the chorus shouted rather than sang the words ‘terrible
toils!’ – a striking effect known today as Sprechstimme.

With these considerations in mind, the Orestes papyrus was reconstructed

and performed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in July 2017. In 408
BCE, it would have been sung as part of Euripides’ tragedy by a 15-man
choir accompanied by aulos, and its realisation makes for a piece of thrilling
and impressive music. A film of the performance (together with other ancient
music) has attracted huge popular interest, with almost 100,000 views
online.

Scholars are finally in a position to propose that Ancient Greek music is

likely, after all, to be at the root of Western music. Inherited by the Romans,
this kind of music would have been sung throughout the cities of the Empire
in the early centuries of the Christian era, as shown by surviving pieces
attributed to Hadrian’s freedman, Mesomedes (2nd century CE). It would
also have provided the harmonic and melodic idiom for the earliest Christian
hymns sung in churches and congregations. A papyrus of a Christian hymn
from around 300 CE is the latest document of ancient music that survives
with ancient notation. It can hardly be doubted that elements of this
tradition endured to influence Gregorian plainsong, as well as other
manifestations of musical performance that underlie the development of
Western music into the Renaissance and since. Callimachus’ words might
now be recited with a new emphasis: ‘Still are thy pleasant voices, thy
nightingales, awake; / For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot
take.’

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08 August, 2018

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