Ancient Greek Music in Performance: Symposion Wien 29. Sept.-1. Okt. 2003. Ed. by Stefan Hagel and Christine Harrauer.

Abstract

How was ancient Greek music performed, and what did it sound like? These questions have intrigued scholars for centuries, especially since the first publication of actual pieces with musical notation by Vincenzo Galilei in his Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (Florence, 1581). By the middle of the seventeenth century, additional pieces had begun to appear in print (at least some of which are forgeries), and performances based on hypothetical reconstructions were presented in various courtly and academic circles. Marcus Meibom, for example, editor of the famous Antiquae musicae auctores septem (Amsterdam 1652), organized a concert at Queen Christina's court in Stockholm devoted entirely to reconstructions of Greek music, and a few decades earlier, Giovanni Battista Doni described in letters addressed to his friend Marin Mersenne several instruments he had designed capable of playing the ancient tonoi. Thus arose a tradition of performance practice applied to an ever expanding corpus of actual music (as distinct from literary remains such as music theory proper and references to music in other literature), informed by a continuing interest in the instrumentarium of ancient Greece, a tradition that continues to the present day. Under the influence of the ‘early music’ movement, increasingly sophisticated attempts were made to create recordings and perform concerts of ‘ancient Greek music’. Some of these pieces (for example, the Epitaph of Seikilos and the fragment from Euripides’ Orestes) have become a part of ‘the canon’—at least in the anglophone world—through their inclusion in most of the anthologies accompanying introductory histories of Western music. Other scholars have explored the inherent musicality of the spoken text (see e.g. Stephen G. Daitz's recordings of Homeric poetry) and continued the long-standing tradition of modern creative resettings of ancient texts based on our knowledge of scales, tonoi, metre, instruments, and so on (e.g. Peter Steadman and his New York Greek Drama Company).