I was just listening to Rozsa’s stirring 'Parade of the Charioteers"from Ben Hur.
It is a great piece of music-but is it something that a 1st century Roman would recognize?
From allmusic.com:
One of Miklos Rozsa’s most famous pieces from his most successful film score, for William Wyler’s Ben Hur (1959), Parade of the Charioteers is a fine example of the composer improvising authentic Roman-era music and also “stealing” from himself, all in epic style. An opening fanfare by the brass builds in intensity as the players sound ever shortening, quickening notes, accompanying the image of the charioteers assembling. The second half of the piece, done to a march tempo, starts out with an almost direct quote by Rozsa from his own Roman march music from the 1949 movie Quo Vadis (another feature film set in the early Christian era). Itself a bold, stirring piece of martial music, the Quo Vadis quotation resolves itself into a new, more brightly scored march, with the winds flaring over the radiant brass instruments as they play out their declamatory phrases with heavy support from the percussion section, all intended to evoke brutal, unbridled decadent (and superficial) glory of Rome and its rulers, and the men who serve them. Ben Hur and Quo Vadis were of a piece together musically–**like every other composer ever asked to write a score for a movie with an ancient Roman setting, Rozsa was faced with the complete absence of even a scrap of authentic Roman music to work from. He had instruments to examine, but not a clue as to what kind of music was played on them. His desire for authenticity led him to Greek sources of the same period as a jumping off point. **His specific inspiration for the Parade of the Charioteers came to him on the Sunday just before Christmas of 1958, standing on the Palantine Hill in Rome, where the Caesars’ palaces had been–he stood there trying to imagine the vistas they would have been, humming and whistling ideas, when the main body of the march coalesced in his thoughts.
ETA: bolding mine.
As we have no written music or detailed descriptions of how people played instruments, we have no real idea how anything sounded prior to about the 13th century. Anybody’s guess as to what Viking, Roman or ancient Greek music sounded like is just guesswork.
Just how old do you think the people on this board are?
A bit of a problem is that the Roman Empire lasted centuries, and the expansion of the empire meant that new musical instruments and styles were added constantly.
Even whether musical instruments were at all common or they preferred Greek theatre-style choruses for their musical needs is a mystery,
I don’t think Miklos Rozsa had a time machine. Without knowledge of instruments, keys or scales, the music would have a strong beat and dramatically suggesting speed and conflict. But it would sound nothing like authentic Roman music.
nm
We have (surviving) Roman trumpets, horns, flutes-so we at least know what their instruments sounded like. Has any commentary on Roman music survived/
Not sure about the material, but researchers have looked at fragments like items like the ones **Ranchoth **linked to so roman recreations based on research are possible, not 100% accurate for sure, but using the reconstructions of the instruments of the day and other evidence allows for performances that are likely to be close to the real thing:
And here is a link to a recorded performance of the group/team:
