Ancient MusicTraces of Music History

MusicalInstruments

VisualImages

Writings

Music

Paleolithic cave paintings

Oldest Instruments36000 B.C.E.

-bone whistles-flutes

Neolithic era(10,000 B.C.E. to 4,000 B.C.E.)

pottery flutes, rattles, drums

Ancient Turkey (6th millenium B.C.E.)

Wall paintings show drummers

The Bronze Age (4th Millennium B.C.E.)

metal bells, jingles, cymbals, rattles, horns, stone carvings of string instruments

• Ancient Mesopotamia(4th millenium B.C.E.

to 1250 B.C.E.)

Instruments, images, writingsMusic for social functions Sumerian and Akkadian writings; Enheduanna—Earliest known composerBabylonia: writings indicate possible use of diatonic scale (1800 B.C.E.)

earliest known musical notationOldest nearly complete piece (1400-1250 B.C.E), stone tablet in Hurrian

Ancient Greece(ca. 800 B.C.E. to 146 B. C.E.)

Ancient Greece and Rome

MusicInstruments

ImagesWritings

Ancient Greece: Music• About 45 pieces or

fragments survive

Papyrus fragment of Euripides’ Orestes.

Earliest of 2 choruses from plays by Euripides

3rd to 2nd century B.C.E.

In a Greek play, the chorus provides

commentary, background, and

summary.

Two Delphic Hymns to Apollo

128 B.C.

Delphi was the home of an oracle and was a major

site for the worship of Apollo

Epitaph of Seikilos

Oldest complete piece of music

1st century C.E.

Signs placed above texts indicate notes, durations.

Epitaph inscribed on a tombstone. Discovered in 1957, having been brought to the attention of scholars in 1883 but lost in 1922. Before 1922, bottom was evened out so it could stand upright as a flower pot.

Ancient Greece: Instruments

• Greek instruments were played solo in the 6th

century BCE• There were

Greek music festivals in the 5th century BCE

• Some musicians became rich, but most were of low status (slaves, servants)

• Aulos

• pipe played in pairs

• Worship of Dionysus—God of Fertility and Wine

• Used in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

• Lyre• 7 strings

struck with a plectrum

• Worship of Apollo—god of light, prophecy, learning, and the arts

• Core element of education in Athens

• Accompanied dancing, singing, poetry (Homer), weddings, recreation

• Kithara

• large lyre

• Used in processions, sacred ceremonies, theater

• Played standing up

• Aulos and Kithara were played solo in the 6th century BCE

Ancient Greece: Images

Many painted images on pottery, walls

• musical treatises: writings about music

• What do the writings tell us about Ancient Greek music?

– Monophony—single melodic line

– Heterophony—melody performed by two or more parts simultaneously in more than one way

– Music invented, played by Gods, demigods

– Harmonia

• unification of parts as an orderly whole

• Music related to arithmetic, astronomy

• Ptolemy (90-168)—astronomer, connected music with mathematics

• Music can affect ethos—ethical character or way of being and behaving

Ancient Greece: Writings

Philosophical treatisesPlato

• balance music and gymnastics• melos

– music as a performing art (included music, text, dance)

– music nearly synonymous with poetry

• Music of the spheres• Against complexity, changing

conventions, mixing style

Aristotle

•less restrictive than Plato•against virtuosity•particular melodies, modes can affect ethos

Theoretical treatises

•no writings

•supposedly discovered Intervals/Ratios

2:1—octave3:2—fifth4:3—fourth

Pythagoras (d. ca. 500 B.C.E.)

• musical rhythm similar to poetic rhythm; patterns of longer and shorter syllables

• Vocal movement

– Continuous—speech-like

– Diastematic—intervallic

• discussed the concepts of note, interval, and scale

• Tetrachord—4 notes spanning a perfect fourth

– Outer notes fixed, inner notes movable

– 3 genera (classes)

Enharmonic—M3-q-qDiatonic—t-t-s Chromatic—m3-s-s

• Aristoxenus (4th cent B.C.E.)

Greater Perfect System• composed of tetrachords

• conjunct—last note of one is first of next

• disjunct—whole tone between

• not based on fixed pitches, but on relationships between intervals

Cleonides (ca. 2nd or 3rd cent C.E.)

• species of consonances

– fourth, fifth, octave subdivided into tones and semitones in a limited number of ways (see p. 19)

• fourth—3 (s-T-T), (T-T-s), (T-s-T)

• fifth—4

• octave—7 --octave species are combinations of species of fourth and fifth (names also used by later Greek authors and medieval theorists for other uses)

Aristides Quintilianus(4th cent C.E.)

• tonoi

– plural of tonos

– scale or set of pitches within a specific range or region of the voice

– associated with character/mood

– also discussed by Quintilianus, Cleonides, and Aristoxenus

Ancient Rome: Music• Music

–Much of culture, including music, imported from Greece

–no settings of Latin texts

• Instruments

–Used at social functions

• Images

• Written descriptions

Tibia

Tuba

Cornu

The Greek Heritage

• Greek music –not rediscovered until Renaissance

• Greek theory—influenced medieval church music and music theory