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Atrium Musicae de Madrid: “First Delphic Hymn to Apollo” (circa 138 B.C.)

From the album Musique de la Grece Antique

The music of ancient Greece exerted an influence upon Western music history comparable to that in fields such as language, drama, and philosophy, but with a remarkable difference: the music itself is largely lost.  We have elaborate treatises on scales and “harmonics” (tuning), the rich mathematical-mystical tradition of Pythagoras, the portentous ethical pronouncements of Plato, but no more than a few shards of musical notation conveying to us how Greek music sounded.

Like that of most world cultures, the music of ancient Greece was primarily monophonic, that is, comprised of a single melody that was usually doubled by numerous singers and instrumentalists.  The Greeks invented the word harmonia, but Greek music lacked harmony in the sense that we understand it.  In its original etymology, the word derives from the verb for “fitting” or “joining”; thus the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has suggested that harmonia must have meant a general “fitting together” of the music, since it could not have referred to simultaneously sounding harmonies or chords.

As can be heard from this example, the music consists of repeated melodic phrases clearly projecting the scalar forms so sedulously developed by contemporary theorists, and driven by the powerfully accented rhythmic quality of the ancient Greek language.

“Though admirable testimonies to Hellenic culture survive in architecture and literature, nothing remains of its music [except for] these sparse fragments miraculously preserved in a few papyri and marbles and other documents…It is as if nothing were left of the Acropolis but a few scattered bits of columns and a pair of ruined capitals.” —Gregorio Paniagua

October 07, 2009, 3:05pm