I am currently reading the Iliad as literature and studying some of the other big Greek plays and poems, both for school and my own personal enjoyment. I’m learning–-and loving–-the stories, but I am extremely curious what they sounded like Way Back When. I know the great stories of Homer & Co. were generally told with musical accompaniment. Basically, some bard would sit there strumming (plucking?) his lyre while he recited stories about various gods, heroes, and monsters. What I want to know is what that music sounded like. Has any of it survived the ages? If not, have any musicologists come up with any ideas of what the music of the ancient Greece probably sounded like? Does anybody know of any good books about this subject that a non-musician would comprehend? Does anybody know of any recordings of ancient Greek music or of any of the ancient Greek plays and/or poems set to music? I thought this would be a good place to ask for help as I search for information on this subject.
There was a PBS series called In Search of the Ilad (or something like that) in which they have filmed a couple of modern-day Greek “Bards”, telling a story with musical accompaniment. It may not be exactly what you found in ancient Greece, but it’s probably the closest you’ll find today. I’ll bet the series is available on video or in some library.
See, I was always under the impression that they didn’t sit, but walked, and the rhythm of their speach was based off of that. Iambic pentameter has a rather nice rhythm for walking and talking. Sitting down just seems too bland, especially for stories of war and heroes.
At least, that’s how my old English professor explained it to us.
I once found a web site with a streaming audio file of sung Iliad. I’m not sure if I can find it again, I’ll have to hunt around for it. It was sung to a lyre that had a 4-note scale, which were also the only four notes used in the singing.
I have been listening to a CD I recently got, Musique de la Grèce antique (Harmonia Mundi HMA 1951015). According to the liner notes, it includes all the tunes, and fragments of tunes, that have been recovered from ancient Greek music, performed on reconstructed period instruments. Only one of them had rhythmic values indicated in the notation; otherwise only pitches were notated, using letters of the alphabet. The rhythms had to be deduced from the metrical scansion of the texts. If you want an idea of ancient Greek music, check it out. It also has the sole surviving fragment of ancient Roman music: a mere four bars.
I just bought this disk for my father the classicist. The record store was dubious enough about it that they had it in a section marked “Supposed ‘reconstructions’ of classical music.” I hope their reconstruction isn’t too accurate. It was so whiny and cacophonous we couldn’t bear to listen to it.
I found it! http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/
You can listen to Demodokos’s song about Ares and Aphrodite from the Odyssey (No Iliad, sorry). This page contains plenty of helpful pointers on the performance of Homeric song, and hopefully will answer your OP questions to your satisfaction. “With some training anyone who is able to read Homer can achieve to improvise the melody to any given Homeric text easily.”
Bonus link: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agm
Ancient Greek Music at the Austrian Academy of Sciences
This site contains all published fragments of Ancient Greek music which contain more than a few scattered notes. All of them are recorded under the use of tunings whose exact ratios have been transmitted to us by ancient theoreticians (of the Pythagorean school, most of them cited by Ptolemaios)…
Alto, the cacophony on that recording was inserted deliberately, to fill in the gaps in the fragments. To substitute for the missing notes. The arranger intended this noise and dissonance to sound “painful” and to be “the personal expression of a profoundly sad feeling in the face of an irreparable loss”. So we can be assured that actual ancient Greek music did not sound this bad. One of the noisemakers was a rattle made of seashells. The explosion at the beginning of the first track “recreates the silence necessary to enter in contact with a music as remote and unknown as this.”
Don’t know if someone else already mentioned this, but Opera began in Florence when some scholars wanted to recreate the style of Greek drama and its choruses.
CalMeacham: I’m not sure, but I may have seen parts of your PBS series on another video series that I checked out of my school library. The original scenes showed an elderly man reciting parts of various ancient Greek plays and people enacting scenes from various stories. I was surprised to see Clytemnestra’s breast in one of the scenes since the video was fairly old and done for educational purposes. Anyway, I’ll be on the lookout for that PBS series, in its entirety, in the future.
El Elvis Rojo: Good point about the walking around. I guess I picture blind old decrepit Homer just standing there talking because, well, he’s blind, old, and decrepit. I’m sure, however, that you and your English professor are probably correct.
Jomo Mojo: Great sites! Thanks. I must say, what I heard was nothing like what I expected. Very interesting. I’ll also be on the lookout for the CD you and Alto mentioned.
Mephisto, if you’re really interested, may I recommend Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales.
A great work, dealing with the origins of oral poetry and of Homeric verse in particular. If you’re interested in what it sounded like, as well as why it might have sounded that way, you should read this. As an amateur classicist and musician, I found it really fascinating.
There’s even a fairly recent edition of The Singer of Tales that comes with a CD of songs by Balkan storytellers/poets of the sort that Lord built his thesis on. (Sorry I don’t know the details; I just happened to see a pile of remaindered copies in Unsworths in London a few months back.)
Yeah, bonzer, that’s the edition I’ve got… haven’t listened to the CD… they’re actually videos that Milman Perry (sort of Lord’s mentor, and whose work Lord is continuing in this book) took. I haven’t really watched them much yet though.
I always thought that you could sing the Iliad to the tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever”, prefacing it with “So be kind to your web footed friends/for a duck may be somebody’s mother” . . .