ANCIENT GREEK MUSIC

THE CLASSICAL ERA

WHY DO WE STUDY ANCIENT GREECE?

• The enduring legacy of ancient Greece lies in the brilliance of its ideas and the depth of its literature and art. .

• Greek art, architecture, philosophy, and religion have also inspired artists and thinkers, who used them as starting points for developing their own style of work.

ART & LITERATURE• They developed

new pottery techniques.  

• Greeks painted pottery and turned an everyday item into art.

Apollo playing the lyre

ART & LITERATURE• Greek sculpture

and pottery show images of people enjoying music and dance.

THEY COMBINED PERFORMANCES OF

DANCE, DRAMA, MUSIC, AND POETRY.

ART & LITERATURE

• The Greeks invented drama.

• Actors wore colorful costumes and masks; a chorus danced and sang as part of each play. 

• Comedies also were performed. These plays displayed remarkable freedom of speech in criticizing public policy and making fun of politicians.  

MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!

• Only a few examples of ancient Greek music have survived.

• Greek philosophers theorized about the origin, nature, and function of music. The Greeks held music in the highest esteem and realized the power it held on the listener.

MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!

• Plato believed music had potentially dangerous spiritual, psychological and political influence .

MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!

• The ancient Greeks also believed that music had power over human emotions and behavior and that when written in the various modes (scales), music would cause predictable reactions.

MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!

• Melodies and rhythms in vocal music were related to the rhythms and speech inflections of the text; instrumental music may have been similarly related to dance movement.

ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS

• We do know what kind of instruments the Greeks had. They had pipes, and lyres, and drums, and cymbals.

ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS

• Their pipes were made from wood or reeds, with holes cut in them for your fingers to play the tune. Some were played vertically, like a recorder, and some were played sideways, like a flute.

ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS

• Sometimes people played more than one pipe at a time. Pipes and drums were played in a loud, lively way, for dancing, and people played this music when they were worshipping Dionysus, the god of wine and parties.

ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS

• The Greeks also had lyres, which are like small harps, and might have sounded something like a guitar.

ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS

• Both women and men played musical instruments. We often see them represented on vases.

• Wealthy boys were taught at school to play on the lyre, and to sing.

ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS

• Wealthy girls may have been taught at home, because they usually could not go to school.

• But most of the women we see playing instruments on vases seem to be poor women (often slaves).

MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC

• Pythagoras, lived in the 6th century B.C., taught that numbers explained the world and started the study of mathematics in Greece.

MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC

• Pythagoras developed the mathematical formulas that are still used today in creating music modes (scales) and other elements of theory and sound.

MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC

• Pythagoreans thought that the heavenly bodies are separated from one another by intervals corresponding to the harmonic lengths of strings, they held that the movement of the spheres gives rise to a musical sound—the “harmony of the spheres.”

MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC

• Pythagoras, thought the so-called music of the spheres to be a perfectly harmonious music, inaudible on earth, produced by the movement of the stars and planets.

MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC

• The astronomy of the Pythagoreans marked an important advance in ancient scientific thought, for they were the first to consider the earth as a globe revolving with the other planets around a central fire.

MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC

• They explained the harmonious arrangement of things as that of bodies in a single, all-inclusive sphere of reality, moving according to a numerical scheme.

MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC

• They believed that music represented the order and harmony of the universe and that by studying the acoustical properties of musical intervals they would come closer to understanding the cosmos.