Power point 1: Ancient Music

1. Ancient Music
Traces of Music History

2. Musical
Instruments

3. Visual
Images

4. Writings

5. Music

6. Paleolithic cave paintings

7. Oldest Instruments
36000 B.C.E.
-bone whistles
-flutes

8. Neolithic era
(10,000 B.C.E. to 4,000 B.C.E.)
pottery flutes, rattles, drums

9. Ancient Turkey
(6th millenium B.C.E.)
Wall paintings show drummers

10. The Bronze Age
(4th Millennium B.C.E.)
metal bells, jingles, cymbals, rattles, horns,
stone carvings of string instruments

11. • Ancient Mesopotamia
(4th millenium B.C.E.
to 1250 B.C.E.)
Instruments, images, writings
Music for social functions
Sumerian and Akkadian writings; Enheduanna—Earliest known composer
Babylonia: writings indicate possible use of diatonic scale (1800 B.C.E.)
earliest known musical notation
Oldest nearly complete piece (1400-1250 B.C.E), stone tablet in Hurrian

12. Ancient Greece
(ca. 800 B.C.E. to 146 B. C.E.)

13. Ancient Greece and Rome
Music
Instruments
Images
Writings

14. Ancient Greece: Music
• About 45 pieces or
fragments survive

15. Papyrus fragment of
Euripides’ Orestes.
Earliest of 2 choruses
from plays by Euripides
3rd to 2nd century B.C.E.
In a Greek play, the
chorus provides
commentary,
background, and
summary.

16. Two Delphic Hymns
to Apollo
128 B.C.
Delphi was the
home of an oracle
and was a major
site for the worship
of Apollo

17. Epitaph of Seikilos
Oldest complete piece of music
1st century C.E.
Signs placed above texts indicate notes,
durations.
Epitaph inscribed on a tombstone.
Discovered in 1957, having been
brought to the attention of scholars in
1883 but lost in 1922. Before 1922,
bottom was evened out so it could
stand upright as a flower pot.

18. Ancient Greece: Instruments
• Greek
instruments
were played
solo in the 6th
century BCE
• There were
Greek music
festivals in the
5th century
BCE
• Some
musicians
became rich,
but most were
of low status
(slaves,
servants)

19. • Aulos
• pipe played
in pairs
• Worship of
Dionysus—
God of
Fertility and
Wine
• Used in the
tragedies of
Aeschylus,
Sophocles,
and
Euripides

20. • Lyre
• 7 strings
struck with a
plectrum
• Worship of
Apollo—god
of light,
prophecy,
learning, and
the arts
• Core element
of education
in Athens
• Accompanied
dancing,
singing, poetry
(Homer),
weddings,
recreation

21. • Kithara
• large lyre
• Used in processions,
sacred ceremonies,
theater
• Played standing up
• Aulos and Kithara
were played solo in
the 6th century BCE

22. Ancient
Greece:
Images
Many painted images on
pottery, walls

23. • musical treatises: writings about music
• What do the writings tell us about Ancient Greek music?
– Monophony—single melodic line
– Heterophony—melody performed by two or more parts
simultaneously in more than one way
– Music invented, played by Gods, demigods
– Harmonia
• unification of parts as an orderly whole
• Music related to arithmetic, astronomy
• Ptolemy (90-168)—astronomer, connected music with
mathematics
• Music can affect ethos—ethical character or way of being and
behaving
Ancient Greece: Writings

24. Philosophical treatises
Plato
• balance music and gymnastics
• melos
– music as a performing art
(included music, text, dance)
– music nearly synonymous with
poetry
• Music of the spheres
• Against complexity, changing
conventions, mixing style
Aristotle
•less restrictive than Plato
•against virtuosity
•particular melodies, modes
can affect ethos

25. Theoretical treatises

26. •no writings
•supposedly
discovered
Intervals/Ratios
2:1—octave
3:2—fifth
4:3—fourth
Pythagoras
(d. ca. 500 B.C.E.)

27. • musical rhythm similar to poetic rhythm;
patterns of longer and shorter syllables
• Vocal movement
– Continuous—speech-like
– Diastematic—intervallic
• discussed the concepts of note, interval, and
scale
• Tetrachord—4 notes spanning a perfect fourth
– Outer notes fixed, inner notes movable
– 3 genera (classes)
Enharmonic—M3-q-qDiatonic—t-t-s Chromatic—m3-s-s
• Aristoxenus (4th cent B.C.E.)

28. Greater Perfect System
• composed of tetrachords
• conjunct—last note of one is first of next
• disjunct—whole tone between
• not based on fixed pitches, but on
relationships between intervals

29. Cleonides (ca. 2nd or 3rd cent C.E.)
• species of consonances
– fourth, fifth, octave subdivided into tones and
semitones in a limited number of ways (see p. 19)
• fourth—3 (s-T-T), (T-T-s), (T-s-T)
• fifth—4
• octave—7 --octave species are combinations of species
of fourth and fifth (names also used by later Greek
authors and medieval theorists for other uses)

30. Aristides Quintilianus
(4th cent C.E.)
• tonoi
– plural of tonos
– scale or set of pitches within a specific range or region of
the voice
– associated with character/mood
– also discussed by Quintilianus, Cleonides, and
Aristoxenus

31. Ancient Rome: Music
• Music
–Much of culture,
including music,
imported from Greece
–no settings of Latin
texts
• Instruments
–Used at social functions
• Images
• Written descriptions
Tibia
Tuba
Cornu

32. The Greek Heritage
• Greek music –not rediscovered until
Renaissance
• Greek theory—influenced medieval church
music and music theory