About
The music of ancient Greece was inseparable from poetry and dancing. It was entirely monodic, there being no harmony as the term is commonly understood. The earliest music is virtually unknown, but in the Homeric era a national musical culture existed that was looked upon by later generations as a “golden age.” The chief instrument was the phorminx, a lyre used to accompany poet-singers who composed melodies from nomoi, short traditional phrases that were repeated. The earliest known musician was Terpander of Lesbos (7th cent. B.C.). The lyric art of Archilochus, Sappho, and Anacreon was also musical in nature.
In the 6th cent. B.C., choral music was used in the drama, for which Pindar developed the classical ode. The main instruments at this time were the aulos, a type of oboe associated with the cult of Dionysus, and the kithara, a type of lyre associated with Apollo and restricted to religious and hymnic use. This classical style of composition decayed in the last quarter of the 5th cent. B.C.
Greek music. (2018). In P. Lagasse, & Columbia University, The Columbia encyclopedia (8th ed.). Columbia University Press. Credo Reference: https://ezproxy.southern.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/columency/greek_music/0?institutionId=2258
Books
Ancient Greek Music
Ancient Greece was permeated by music, and the literature teems with musical allusions. Here at last is a clear, comprehensive, and authoritative account that presupposes no special knowledge of music. Topics covered include the place of music in Greek life, instruments, rhythm, tempo, modesand scales, melodic construction, form, ancient theory and notation, and historical development. Thirty surviving examples of Greek music are presented in modern transcription with analysis, and the book is fully illustrated. Besides being considered on its own terms, Greek music is here furtherilluminated by being considered in ethnological perspective, and a brief Epilogue sets it in its place in a border zone between Afro-Asiatic and European culture. The book will be of value both to classicists and historians of music.
Music in Antiquity
Music was one component of the cultural continuum that developed in the contiguous civilizations of the ancient Near East and of Greece and Rome. This book covers the range and gamut of this symbiosis, as well as scrutinizes archeological findings, texts, and iconographical materials in specific geographical areas along this continuum. The book, volume VIII of Yuval - Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University, provides an updated scholarly assessment of the rich soundscapes of ancient civilizations.
Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought
Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamorphosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with 'contemporary' debates - contemporary with debates in the Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.
Listen to a Recreation of Ancient Greek Music
- Ancient Greek Music - The Lyre of Classical AntiquityThis video features clips from 4 of my many albums of my of ancient lyre music, featuring both the actual surviving fragments of the music of Ancient Greece, as well as my original compositions for replica lyre, in a selection of some of the original Ancient Greek Modes...
Videos-Ancient Musical Sounds
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
Music is not written down but written about in ancient Rome. Ancient Greeks believe music is a source of power. Man's first songs are celebratory. The oldest surviving religious sound is from the Jewish shofar.
Rediscovering Ancient Greek Music
- Rediscovering Ancient Greek MusicFirst choral performance with reconstructed aulos of reconstructed ancient scores of Athenaeus Paean (127 BC) and Euripides Orestes chorus (408 BC), with the evidence presented and explained by Professor Armand D'Angour, Jesus College Oxford.