Specifically for which the melody is still known.
Oldest I can think of would be “Greensleeves”.
A friend of mine who was into world cultures said that children’s taunting (nyah nyah nah nah nah) is universal. It’s melodic; is it a song? Are we hardwired taunters who have been needling each other for millenia?
Googling “oldest song world” gets a lot of hits claiming this is:
“The world’s oldest-known preserved music notation, complete with both words and music, was discovered in the mid-1990s in the ruins of the lost city of Ugarit, now Ras Shamra, on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria. The clay tablet is marked with cuneiform, meaning “wedge-shaped”, signs in the ancient Hurrian language. The artefact is 3200 years old, yet experts have brought sound to the long-lost hymn through modern musical notation and recordings.”
That’s an interesting link. I wonder can that song be sung?
Here’s another article, but I’m still waiting for the video to load.
Amazon has a preview & download of the Ugarit piece. Or, rather, a realisation of it. Note the crucial line in the article linked to: “Although experts’ interpretations differ in melody and rhythm”…those can be quite big differences! (On preview: “I have chosen notes to fit the accompaniment”, from the second article, sums it up nicely.)
Asking for the oldest song ‘for which the melody is still known’ is quite a tricky one. The majority of music across the world and across history has been transmitted without any clear notation. Even that can consist of nothing more than ‘little higher, then little lower, etc.’, which is fine as an aide memoir, but hopeless for somebody trying to completely rediscover a melody.
Perhaps I’d opt to rephrase the question, albeit into something equally unanswerable, along the lines of ‘what music would be recognised as familiar by people who lived longest ago’. My strong suspicion is that the answer would lie among traditions of religious chant somewhere in the vicinity of the Middle East.
The earliest music for which we have a surviving notation which is understood to the point we can recreate the pitches of individual notes with accuracy is that of the Notre Dame school of the 12th century. Here was where European music began to develop one of its unique identifying features: the accurate notation of melodic lines in a way which they could be combined to create vertical harmony, i.e. chords. (On preview: compare with the description in the second article, which seems to describe a tablature notation, which notates chords but does not indicate melodic lines.) While people certainly disagree over details of how this music was intended to be performed, we can be fairly confident that the composers would recognise their own work - here’s an example.
Obligatory Mel Brooks reference.
One of those Ripley’s Beleive it or not cartoons once claimed that the Oldest Song in the World is that Shadouf, which is sung while using the counterweighted Egyptian water-lifting device called the “shadouf”. What evidence there is that this same chant has been used all these years, without changing, I don’t know. Frequently the answer to Ripley is “Not”.
Here, for what it’s worth, is a 1912 account:
Here’s a picture:
http://www.phouka.com/pharaoh/egypt/photos/other/shadouf-01.html
“Happy Birthday”, of course. I learned lyrics for it in (the presumably original) Classical Latin in High School, and it wasn’t something the teacher made up because Stephen Colbert knows them too, so that’s 2000 years right there!
Listen to Stephen Fry’s Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music to really understand the mindboggling complexity of how music developed.
It was a radio show, and a book. I’ve listened to the radio show.
It’s heavy going for someone like me, but fascinating nevertheless.
Thanks for the link
Eh. Two scholars, Anne Kilmer and Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin claimed to have correctly reconstructed the piece. Both interpretations are completely different and of course both of them were adamant that theirs was correct. You can compare them, along with another at this page.
However, you’re forgetting Greek musical notation which is also well-understood. The oldest complete song in Greek notation is the Seikilos Epitaph. There are older fragments, most notably the Delphic Hymns.
Greensleeves dates from the 15th century; it’s not particularly old.
The BBC’s history of India program that my local PBS station has been airing this week showed the Rig-Veda hymns that have been orally (and gesturally) passed down for 3000 years. It is speculated that they predate speech and most closely resemble birdsong.
While the lyrics have remained pretty static, we can only guess at the original melodies. Actually, there really aren’t melodies; the Vedas are prose, not song, although they were written in meter, like Shakespeare.
I cannot claim any amount of knowledge about where it fits into music history, but here is a pretty interesting link on ancient Greek music. There are MIDI recreations of notated songs as well as .wavs of instrumentals.
I suppose you’re right, that these do come into the definition I suggested, of modern reconstructions being recognisable to the Greeks themselves. There’s a far greater amount of disagreement over how a performance was actually arranged than with the example I gave, though - when we don’t even know whether it was monophonic or not, I find it hard to see it as anything other than the Ancient Greek element being subservient to modern musical decision-making.
Predate speech? That’s wild speculation, not just your everyday, garden variety speculation.
It is, but so is to varying degrees all musical performance. I sometimes read reviews of performances that go “Beethoven would have agreed with this interpretation.” Of course, that’s largely empty speculation. We can only guess at how exactly pieces actually sounded prior to recording technology. There’s a continuum of interpretation between the essentially perfect and mechanical reproduction of digital recordings, and the complete WAG of Ugarit music reconstruction. Somewhere in the middle you would have contemporaries only recognizing the melody, and others simply disagreeing with the interpretation.
Between Greek notation and the Notre Dame school, there were musical writing systems that were more or less accurate. One text Musica Enchiriadis, from the 9th century describes a system for the notation of polyphonic music. Because it’s a treatise, it only contains short examples that look like this.
There also, of course Plainchant, in particular Gregorian chant. It’s a little hard to put dates on accurate transcriptions. There was already a fairly old oral tradition, when monks started making notations that were at first only meant to help them remember a song they’d previously memorized and gradually became precise enough that someone who didn’t know the piece beforehand could reproduce it.