How did Ancient Greek music sound?
youtube.com
youtube.com
And that pipe music was fantastic. Reminds me a lot of the style of Colin Stetson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra-EsJpkG9o
The pipe music instantly reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=616PssEzrqo
Ioannis Stratakis at Podium-Arts https://ancientgreek.eu/ mostly records in reconstructed Classical Greek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSbyr6ah0h8 .
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
And Daemonia Nymphe for example would a greek band, that tries to reproduce the spirit of ancient greek music (not 1:1 reconstruction, but with authentic instruments).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemonia_Nymphe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRxEXasEDj8
And I also can recommend crete. I camped wild next to an old temples there, which was otherwise occupied by goats. Interesting experience.
https://youtu.be/E2q5PZqqZek?si=nV-_ESM3BT4dDTzK
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z2KglJSZGZE&pp=ygUWYW5jaWVudCB...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PluzIW9LKSE&list=OLAK5uy_kqaRp...
The performances are great, the venue (a courtyard of the Venetian castle) is cool, and the host is warm and welcoming — we had a really good experience.
Also, in Athens, outside the Roman Forum site, the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments is really great, sometimes has performances, and the restaurants on that street are frequented by bouzouki players as well.
This really just seems that its just how it "sounded".
The music from this topic sounded odd to me for a somewhat ironic reason - it felt far too contemporarily chorial, for me to imagine this is what Ancient Greek music would have sounded like. For contrast here [2] is Wardruna, a very popular Norwegian band that's driven by classical Norwegian traditions. So that would not only have been in an era like the one you're describing, but the song itself is also chorial in nature - yet the sound is extremely distinct.
actually reminds me quite a bit of the sitar!
It certainly seems like the performance sounded much better live than it was recorded. The venue looks like it would have awesome acoustics for that type of performance. I don't know how much the (seemingly) poor recording quality affects your perception of the music.
"This is what ancient Greek music sounds like" is kind of like recording a restaurant version of happy birthday and saying that's what "modern Western music sounds like"
Although I really enjoyed this part: https://youtu.be/4hOK7bU0S1Y?si=4ImysYmjramsxsKX&t=498
Seriously, thank you for posting this link. I hope your comment doesn't get buried.
But like everyone else, I don't want to be mean to researchers moonlighting as musicians. She did the job in terms of depicting what they think the music basically sounded like, and it's not reasonable to study conduction techniques for 4 years just so your team can make a better YouTube video.
Harry Partch - 2 Studies on Ancient Greek Scales is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6IinoChSVA
There is also an acquired taste for non-standard tunings like the taste for beer. Some beers though are just bad.
Like ass. Ass and kazoo.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't studied it seriously since college, but among evidence to support this theory is the idea that many of the titles used to describe the heroes may have been formulaic mnemonic aids that the singer/poet could keep in their back pocket and pull out during improvisation to fit the required meter.
That the epics pre-existed is true, that Homer was a singular author with specific "voice" (not just someone who wrote them down) is debated (and favored iirc).
>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.
Yes, that part is bs.
The main plot lines of the epics, which are quite clever, must have been designed consciously and whoever did that should be considered the main creators of the epics. I am among those who believe that the main authors of Iliad and Odyssey must have been distinct, but they probably were members of the same family, e.g. the main author of the Odyssey might have been a niece or granddaughter of "Homer".
In any case while the main authors have devised the plots, they have expressed the plot using a huge amount of verse sequences, metaphors and similes inherited via oral tradition from their ancestors and the selection of a verse sequence appropriate for a certain point in the story might have been partially non-deterministic and unconscious.
Once the initial versions of the epics had been performed, it is likely that all later public performances by the main authors or by their descendants have never repeated completely identically, but with small variations in verse choices, until they have been fixed in writing. It is possible that multiple variants have been fixed in writing or the copists have made various mistakes, because the canonical variants known today have been edited in their final form only many hundreds of years later.
There is nothing 'unconscious' about creating a long epic. It takes conscious effort especially if you expect it to be coherent and enjoyable. Besides, is there a connection between schizophrenia and metered speech? Wouldn't a schizophrenic epic be unmetered?
Tourette's is an example of the barrier between impulse and physical action being weakened.
Schizophrenia can be seen as the weakening of the barrier between impulse and belief.
Telling an epic story off-the-cuff requires weakening the barrier between your subconscious and speech
Personally, I think it's more likely that there was a collection of oral stories passed down by healthy people, each illustrating a specific real-life lesson, that got collected by one guy and stitched together. In the same way modern showrunners borrow scenes and references.
Like Achilles' heel is a warning against pride/arrogance, and the Cyclops and the sheep is a fun way to expose kids to possessive anger
I have a whole gripe with the "unconscious", unless all we mean by it is "past events affect who you are and affect your behavior" in which case I cant imagine Freud is the first person to have believed this.
This is the current scholarly consensus.
>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.
This is absolutely nuts. It could only be the result of someone reading Sperry and Gazzaniga's split brain experiments and deeply over-interpreting them.
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.
Western music history roughly goes like: early polyphony, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern (where e.g. Romantic has subdivisions, and you could argue Modern is over or has many subdivisions, etc.).
The current use of the term "classical music" refers to all serious, composed music.
"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."
[1] https://ancientlyre.com/ [2] https://michaellevy.bandcamp.com/track/epitaph-of-seikilos-c...
W. Sidney Allen wrote Vox Graeca[1] and Vox Latina which are well-known works which detail both what we know about pronunciation as well as explaining how we came to know these things. We surely don't know everything and scholarship evolves, but it is hardly like what you seem to be suggesting.
It is interesting to know about some of the sources: ancient grammarians wrote about pronunciation, people poked fun at how other people talked in letters, epigraphers sometimes made mistakes on the order of "could of".
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/classi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3AbylWGjog&list=PL-7hwegJPk...
A unique Ancient Greek instrument that was apparently the early forerunner of the organ.
Given enough of the right samples and their context, you can make strong informed guesses about pronunciation from how words are used in structured samples like poetry/plays that embed rhythm, rhyme, etc in established ways; from patterns in the way words shift over time; etc
There are quite a lot of signals you can feel confident drawing from, but of course you can't get to 100% accuracy even if you had perfect insight or even heard the word spoken because pronunciation does still vary by individual, family, community, context, etc
I don't know what's right here myself or how established the consensus is around what might be right, but the discussion you're responding to isn't frivolous or unreasonable on its face.
The consensus might be bang on. Or it might be wildly wrong. Or something else. Who can say?
My point is a pretty straightforward one. To say you have knowledge of a thing, you need to be able to personally verify whatever-it-is. I can personally verify I'm sitting in a chair. I can never verify that music sounded like that 2000 years ago, cos I was not there. I can read a book that describes the sound, but that still doesn't mean I can verify it!
"We" cannot know a thing - there may be a consensus opinion (the wisdom of crowds and all that) - it might be a good guess - but this is not knowledge. And can never be.
This doesn't take away from the fun endeavour though. If you want to recreate sounds from the descriptions given in text, go ahead - I'll listen to it.
There really are some things that cannot be known. It is valuable and useful to distinguish between belief/hypothesis and knowledge.
The worst thing, imo, is to believe that one knows when one is a state of belief - this is the curiosity killer.
Neither can a person who has never left the US who realistically would not visit France verify whether they are speaking French as is spoken in Marseilles. Yet the effort to approximate it is not futile, and having practiced with a native French speaker from Marseilles to the point of fluency is usually proof enough for many to say that they know French as is spoken in Marseilles, even though it seems to me that you would not regard this as knowledge.
How do you propose one verifies how music sounded 2000 years ago?
By your standard, most of us also don't "know" that the Civil War happened or that there is a vacuum in space. It's deductions, inductions, personal attestations, and consensuses all the way down. Yet, to navigate a modern world that presents itself as scientific and evidence-based, most of us adopt beliefs about these things -- sometimes with much stubbornness and sometimes very lightly -- and call these things "knowledge" too.
You can be a stickler about your use of the term, but the more you are, the more distanced you find yourself from common usage, the more needlessly contentious and pedantic discussions become, and the more you're left to come up with your own language to describe all the usages you've chosen to reject.
On the other hand, my assessments and understanding is my own. My brain is not "outsourced" to consensus or experts. I'm fine with that!
I'm interested to see if you have a suggestion that would draw this distinction out better. The idea that something can be 'known' at large by a group, and the idea that the individual 'knows' because he has personally verified something. Are both these really "knowledge"? Can knowledge be a team sport? Is knowledge what the person with the biggest megaphone, or the most supporters say it is?
I'm also interested to hear a better term than 'know', for those things that the individual has verified vs what you would call (group) "knowledge" - but I personally think my 'hard' definition is the proper one. One knows, or one believes (or theorises/hypothesises/etc). It might (or might not) be fair/useful to hold consensus opinion - but, as far as the individual is concerned this type of information ought to be characterised as 'belief'.
I'm sure you can tell, but I think knowledge (all thinking and emotions actually) occur in the individual only. A generic "we" cannot know anything - knowledge is enlivened in the individual mind only.
I think this is all self-evident, but I'm always happy to hear alternative views, better definitions of terms, etc. I invite you to explain further and correct me!
I find it amusing that you say you have a “very basic understanding“ of Greek and then judge whether a team from Oxford who has been studying this for many years is pronouncing it correctly.