[HN Gopher] How did Ancient Greek music sound?
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How did Ancient Greek music sound?
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 149 points
Date : 2024-05-02 03:46 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| maremmano wrote:
| Every year, for about 10 years, I have spent a month's holiday in
| Greece, in the Cyclades, in Crete.
|
| 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
| aliasxneo wrote:
| Would you mind giving some additional recommendations? I found
| the music in this link captivating. I would love to hear more
| of these original sounds.
| lukan wrote:
| Not op, but my main recommendation would be to visit greek in
| spring or autumn and not in summer, unless you really like it
| hot. Spring can be more wet, so late autumn, when most of the
| tourists are gone, but while it is still warm enough, would
| be my recommendation.
|
| 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.
| SmallBets wrote:
| Great band recommendation, thank you! From a fellow Cretan
| andoando wrote:
| Check out some Armenian music. We have a lot of practioners
| of the duduk for example which goes back 1500-2000 years.
|
| https://youtu.be/E2q5PZqqZek?si=nV-_ESM3BT4dDTzK
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z2KglJSZGZE&pp=ygUWYW5jaWVudCB.
| ..
| tomcam wrote:
| That first video by Canberk Ulas is a revelation. Wow. The
| music is as good as it gets. Albioni's music is
| sensational, and Canberk Ulas plays with both artistic and
| technical mastery. The wind player in me freaks out seeing
| his cheeks blown out to cartoony proportions, which as I
| understand may be considered good form, but still.
| noahlt wrote:
| [not OP] On Naxos, in the summer the DOMUS Festival has
| traditional (not ancient, but traditional) Greek music:
| https://www.facebook.com/p/DOMUS-Festival-100066336529833/
|
| 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.
| andsoitis wrote:
| If you go to an island like Paros and venture into small
| towns away from the tourist centers like Parikia and Naoussa,
| you will not only walk on ancient Byzantine roads but stumble
| upon a lot of traditional gatherings. Not quite platonic or
| Aristotelian, but still different enough from most western
| musical geometry.
| buggythebug wrote:
| Crete is not part of Cyclades
| Clamchop wrote:
| There's a more charitable reading that you should probably
| give them given how much time they have spent in the region!
| It's a list of three distinct places: mainland Greece, the
| Cyclades, Crete.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Did you read over some of the punctuation? I did not read
| Cyclades as being part of Crete as written
| giva wrote:
| It's subtle, as a non native english speaker I read it as a
| "zoom" too.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The the author is at fault for one's own
| misunderstanding? That's pretty egregious on it's own
| reading.
| buggythebug wrote:
| Shhh and don't tell anyone about mainland Greece yet to be
| disturbed by tourism even though it has always been very easily
| accessible
| bigyikes wrote:
| Someone in the video talks about Homer as though he were the
| author of the epics. My impression was that these epics came
| about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.
|
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| That was the theory of Milman Parry, who made visits to
| Yugoslavia and other areas of Eastern Europe where oral poetry
| was still widely practiced, and noted similarities between the
| form of the existing traditions and that of Homer.
|
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Someone in the video talks about Homer as though he were the
| author of the epics. My impression was that these epics came
| about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by
| bards._
|
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The claim of not being created consciously seems much more
| applicable to many of the scripts of recent movies than to the
| Homeric Epics.
|
| 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.
| neaden wrote:
| To be clear Jaynes is pure pseudo scientist, I don't think
| there is a neuroscientist, historian, anthropologist, or a
| classicist in the world who thinks he has any value. It's an
| interesting idea for a sci-fi setting like Westworld, but it's
| rubbish.
| linearrust wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| sdwr wrote:
| I kinda buy it. If you go back to Freud, he describes how
| impulses and desires are repressed and sublimated while the
| mind is functioning normally.
|
| 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
| beezlewax wrote:
| Freud "decided" a lot of things, and a lot of them are pure
| inventions of his fairly unique mind
| andoando wrote:
| Why would you give me any credit to any of Freuds ideas? Im
| honestly astonished the guy has any kind of credibility.
| bllguo wrote:
| this is quite hyperbolic. he has too complicated a legacy
| to dismiss this easily. some of the concepts he pioneered
| include talk therapy, transference, significance of early
| childhood on psychological development, the influence of
| the unconscious on behavior - all of which we accept
| today
| andoando wrote:
| Was Freud really the first person to suggest talking to
| people about your problems can be therapeutic, or that
| the way you raise children affects them dramatically? As
| far as I am aware, the actual contents of the therapy he
| proposed, psychoanalysis, is complete bunk and no more
| effective than other forms of therapy.
|
| 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.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| >My impression was that these epics came about via oral
| tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.
|
| 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.
| mrmetanoia wrote:
| Youtube for folks who prefer not to click twitter links:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y
| drooopy wrote:
| I have some very basic understanding of greek, so I'm not an
| expert by any stretch of the imagination. But the way that they
| pronounce (sing) diphthongs is not quite right and I feel that
| makes the song sound... rougher somehow.
| titanomachy wrote:
| They are also probably trying to reproduce Ancient Greek
| pronunciation, which treats diphthongs differently. I believe
| in Ancient Greek the sounds were pronounced closer to how
| they are spelled, and the collapse into diphthongs happened
| later (nt -> d, mp -> b, ai -> e, etc.).
| verisimi wrote:
| No one knows, nor could they ever know.
| swatcoder wrote:
| To some degree that's true, to some degree it's not.
|
| 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.
| baruz wrote:
| There is plenty of evidence, well documented, of how
| ancient Greek languages, and Attic in particular,
| sounded. Transliterations of Latin, Egyptian, Persian
| names, and words taken from other languages, and Latin
| transliterations of Greek names and words. Non-
| orthographic spellings and misspellings. Rhymes and the
| preservation of supersegmental qualities in poetry.
| Grammarians describing in detail how likely barbarians
| were to mispronounce certain words and how to best
| pronounce words. There's more to learn, but it's not
| unknowable.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! we've changed the URL to that from
| https://twitter.com/classicstudies/status/165222693571865805...
| above.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Thanks for the original link, X videos load way faster and
| with less bloat than Youtube videos for me.
| JPKab wrote:
| Are Twitter links discouraged on HN?
| leornere wrote:
| In a similar vein, here is a performance of Beowulf in Old
| English accompanied by music from an Anglo-Saxon lyre:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WcIK_8f7oQ Although I don't know
| how much of the performance style is reconstructed.
|
| And that pipe music was fantastic. Reminds me a lot of the style
| of Colin Stetson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra-EsJpkG9o
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| And here's part of the epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
| danans wrote:
| If you like this kind of stuff, you should listen to Peter
| Pringle singing the Epic of Gilgamesh while playing a
| reconstructed oud.
|
| 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.
|
| https://youtu.be/QUcTsFe1PVs?si=VvXGMhmoNwtz67Ld
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Peter Pringle is the shit, he makes tons of instruments for his
| songs! https://youtu.be/ntnBuQAvFjA is also wonderful.
| billbrown wrote:
| There's also Michael Levy who is composing new music for ancient
| instruments[1] as well as playing the oldest song "Epitaph of
| Seikilos" on a kithara[2]
|
| [1] https://ancientlyre.com/ [2]
| https://michaellevy.bandcamp.com/track/epitaph-of-seikilos-c...
| John23832 wrote:
| I know this may just not be my cup of tea because I have the mind
| of an overly stimulated modern person... but that sounded awful.
| soneca wrote:
| I enjoyed. Particularly that double-flute. A whole concert with
| that would be interesting. But I also enjoyed the chorus
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| Chorus was excellent, but then again I used to sing medieval
| chat and whatnot so it felt very comfortable.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It continues to fascinate me that music can sound/be
| perceived so differently. The flute was almost painful to
| listen to, with my ears. The chorus kinda rough as well, but
| I think that might just be the recording.
| genman wrote:
| The same here, but I also listen to variety of music.
| awfulneutral wrote:
| From this video it seems like there's no record of timing or
| emphasis, like you'd get with music transcribed today. So I
| wonder how close this was to how it sounded...if you take a
| familiar song, and just play the notes strung together with
| none of the right timing it might sound pretty unrecognizable.
| John23832 wrote:
| That's how I feel, it felt jumbled. No structure, either in
| tempo or between the instruments. I'm not sure that that
| would be recorded, so I'm pretty sure this couldn't be how
| this was actually performed.
|
| This really just seems that its just how it "sounded".
| coliveira wrote:
| From what we know, greek music followed the rhythm of the
| language, which had specific accentuation and different
| lengths for each syllable. From this one can reconstruct the
| rhythm, especially from ancient poetry such as the Iliad for
| example. Now, the tempo is another story, it is difficult to
| know why they decided on this.
| awfulneutral wrote:
| Ah, that's interesting, thanks for the info!
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| While I enjoyed it, perhaps use this as a device... imagine
| you'd never heard Bach, or Led Zeppelin, or whatever the kids
| are listening to these days. Imagine days ruled by the weather
| and timed by the sun. Where you aren't quite sure how we all
| got here but you certainly aren't going to do anything to anger
| the gods. Now imagine that music in context.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I have a taste for folk music from just about every culture,
| and I wouldn't say much of it's an acquired taste. Most of it
| can sound alien, but still almost immediately pleasant. For
| instance the Chinese guqin [1] in China is basically nothing
| like anything else. The sound is quite unique but the style
| of play is just completely alien. Yet I think most would find
| it relaxing. Put yourself in the mindset of listening to that
| somewhere in nature, perhaps in front of a nice flowing
| stream.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmEHN82admY
|
| [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6RCY-G-NlA
| mock-possum wrote:
| I think there are some intentional reasons it sounds that way,
| but I think there are also some incidental reasons: The reverb
| in that venue is crazy - it really jumps out at me how much it
| sort of resolves to a tone of its own, which has to sometimes
| be dissonant with what's being by played / sung. So what you're
| hearing isn't always in tune. Additionally, this is an
| expressive performance, so between the echo and the
| interpretative approach to the meter, what you're hearing isn't
| always in time either.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If you prefer your ancient greek eurovision style: Ma Ton Dia
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fA6dTnyrE
| dylan604 wrote:
| The vocals definitely did not inspire me to want to find more.
| However, the guy playing the pipes toward the end was very
| impressive. The first person got short changed in showcasing
| his abilities. As someone that only played a woodwind
| instrument in middle school through high school, I never was
| able to do the circular breathing. This guy was impressive to
| me with his ability, and I did like the song as well. Then
| there was the conductor, but I always laugh at the mime-like
| performances they put on.
| giantrobot wrote:
| At least to my ears the actual recording of the flute sounded
| terrible as if the venue did not have a great mic set up. On my
| phone I had to blast the audio just to hear the flute but then
| the applause was super loud.
|
| 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.
| samirillian wrote:
| Yeah, seems like they're all scholars of music, they need some
| real musicians/composers.
| taway789aaa6 wrote:
| These are not trained singers. They're off-rhythm, and off-key
| in ways that sheet music would not be able to convey.
|
| "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"
| oersted wrote:
| They don't sound like professionals, especially the singers.
| Fair enough, this is quite a niche research project, they are
| probably all academics that do this as a hobby.
|
| Although I really enjoyed this part:
| https://youtu.be/4hOK7bU0S1Y?si=4ImysYmjramsxsKX&t=498
| oersted wrote:
| Found a clean cut of the cool double flute performance:
| https://youtu.be/6JFa8BZt2B0?si=h3cugZ5KtyNGZXTG
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Perhaps the one case where autotune might be appropriate.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| Beyond the bad acoustics, I think the real issue may have
| ultimately been the conductor. Those movements are more
| confusing than helpful, and seemed out of sync with the song.
|
| 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.
| 60secs wrote:
| > How did Ancient Greek music sound?
|
| Like ass. Ass and kazoo.
| soneca wrote:
| Interesting anecdote that I am not entirely sure is true, is that
| "classical music" genre got its name because music was the only
| art that we didn't know how it was in Ancient Greece and Rome,
| where the term "classic" is usually applied to.
|
| 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.
| asfodelsu wrote:
| Look at Greek composer and researcher Halaris also
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3AbylWGjog&list=PL-7hwegJPk...
| divbzero wrote:
| Reminds me of what my friend who studied classics said: that we
| don't know for sure how Greek and Latin actually sounded like in
| ancient times.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Giving your friend the benefit of the doubt, sometimes one gets
| the wrong perspective from a careful, qualified statement.
|
| 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...
| primitivesuave wrote:
| Related: Sid Meier used a modern rendition of the First Delphic
| Hymns to Apollo (the earliest known instance of recorded sheet
| music) as the background music in Civilization 3.
|
| https://youtu.be/0iwPolnMXEc?si=ZlVPcClhT_aOK4tu&t=55
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Title should be "Rediscovering Ancient Greek Music (2017)"
| enriquto wrote:
| I'm really confused by the aulos... How does such a short pipe
| produce these low notes? By the looks of it I would expect it to
| sound two octaves higher.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Indeed. The first aulete touches on this. He mentions the bore
| of his deer-bone pipes is larger than that of later double-
| pipes, which were made of wood, and when the second aulete
| plays the latter, the pitch is notably sharper. Not a thorough
| explanation of the perceived disparity, but the instruments
| might also seem a bit shorter on video than they actually are.
| kubeia wrote:
| For another take on reconstructing ancient greek music, you
| should look at the work of Annie Belis (mostly in french but she
| has a wikipedia page
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_B%C3%A9lis) and the musical
| ensemble - Kerylos - that she created
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHzK2yVKDmpWEC-igDSeOYg
|
| "Founded at the beginning of the 90s, the Ensemble Kerylos,
| directed by Annie Belis, is dedicated to Ancient Greek and Roman
| Music. It plays only authentic scores as accurately as possible,
| using instruments that are faithfully reconstructed."
| Oarch wrote:
| Also check out modern recreations of the hydraulis.
|
| A unique Ancient Greek instrument that was apparently the early
| forerunner of the organ.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| That performance around the 8m40s mark is truly impressive.
| openrisk wrote:
| An interesting question is how much of ancient greek music might
| be still with us (without being explicitly identified as such).
|
| 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.
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