All of what we know about the roots of Western civilization, from the plays of Euripides and Sophocles to the poems of Sappho and Homer, were meant to be sung. That makes music, in many ways, the first language of the Western world. Virtually all the poetry composed by the lions of Greek literature was composed with music and dance, and intended for performance.
“From the 8th century BC when Homer composed his epics, through the lyric age of poets like Sappho and Pindar, and up to the end of the 5th century BC when the tragedian Euripides and the comic playwright Aristophanes were composing choruses,” said Oxford University’s Armand D’Angour, a professor of classics at Jesus College Oxford University.
Music and dance played an integral role in Greek culture, but what it sounded like has largely been lost to history.
Musical notation as we know it only began in the 9th century with the creation of Gregorian chant. For centuries, that question – what did Greek music sound like? – has been elusive to composers and scholars. As Giuseppe Verdi famously quipped, “Research into ancient Greek music is pointless.”
But scholars like D’Angour are beginning to reconstruct the sound of Greek music from the nearly 60 surviving documents extant from the era. Some of those documents include writings by the 2nd century mathematician Ptolemy. Others are papyrus notations that indicate how the beat of the music fell. The rhythms of the songs are actually drawn from the words themselves, which are a mixture of long and short syllables.
In an email exchange, D’Angour explained that ancient Greece developed its own form of musical notations – one for vocal music based on the Greek alphabet, another for instrumental notation. The latter used symbols that D’Angour believes were based on representations of the aperture of pipe-holes in Greek reed instruments.
Marks on papyrus, D’Angour said, demonstrate how the beat fell, which helped dancers know when and how to strike their feet. A handbook by the fourth century writer Alypius of Alexandria, includes these notations, which were preserved into the Renaissance
“Tempo indications don’t exist, but the metre of the sung texts gives some indication as to whether music should be sung fast or slow – and that would have varied depending on context and resources,” D’Angour wrote.
The earliest surviving papyrus with such notations was a few lines of music from Euripides’ 5th century B.C. play Orestes, found in 1892 in Egypt. Stone tablets found in Delphi includes the hymns to Apollo that were performed in 127 BC. D’Angour said they “preserve almost perfectly what amounts to over 100 bars (measures) of sung music.” Currently, scholars and musicians are able to play the lyre (from which we get the word “lyric”) and the auloi, a double-reeded oboe-like wind instruments.
Since 2013, D’Angour has been working on a project to investigate how ancient Greeks made music. The research has spawned performances on well-preserved auloi, reconstructed by technicians and researchers from the European Music Archaeology Project. By 2016, D’Angour said he was able to reconstruct the music of the Orestes papyrus for chorus with the aulos accompaniment.
The work was presented with choir and aulos-player at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in July 2017, together with other reconstructed ancient scores. A YouTube video of the performance has been viewed more than 100,000 times.
D’Angour describes the music as “powerful, exciting, sedate, hypnotic,” depending on what context it was composed for and what instruments were being used.