Who knows how humans will listen to our music in a millennium, but they will probably do so by referring to the instructions we leave about how our musical notation system works. Our ancestors of a thousand years ago did not provide us with such tools, but science has still managed to decipher how a song sounded 2,500 years ago.
Musical notation is a modern invention, which is why historians and archaeologists have great difficulty in reconstructing the melodies that ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians and Greeks heard. The arduous work of bringing an ancient song into the present is carried out with zeal and a multidisciplinary effort that combines the historicity of the melodies with the tonal importance of the syllabic separation of the letters carved on stone blocks. Using these resources and various techniques, some experts told the BBC that they managed to find an approximation of how a song sounded 2,500 years ago and that we can now listen to it through a recreation directed by classical music expert Armand D'Angour.
To listen to the song, click here.
The piece itself is performed by David Creese, of Newcastle University, and is composed based on inscriptions found on a stone from ancient Greece. The musical instrument used appears to be a kind of 8-string cittern with movable bridges, known as a Canon. The composition is based on rhythms that can be deduced from the way the lyrics are written. However, a vocal musical pattern was discovered, consisting of letters and alphabetical signs placed over the Greek letters. The Greeks worked with mathematical relationships in musical intervals; an octave is 2:1, a fifth is 3:2, a fourth is 4:3, and so on. The notation gives a precise indication of relative pitch.
In addition to having to set aside our preconceptions and probably tune our instruments to pitches entirely foreign to us, we must understand that in the ancient Greek language, voices rose in pitch on certain syllables and fell or deepened on others. In that era, accents indicated pitch, not stress.
Part of the music during this period used subtle intervals such as quarter tones. And sometimes the melody did not adhere to the word "tone". Curiously, Euripides was considered an avant-garde composer who frequently violated the long-standing traditions of Greek popular song by neglecting the word "tone" and giving the melodies his own imprint. So with this, we have been able to hear what the ancients listened to, while bathing in milk and eating bunches of grapes while reclining in tubs of pure gold.
BBC
