In a similar vein, here is a performance of Beowulf in Old English accompanied by music from an Anglo-Saxon lyre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WcIK_8f7oQ
Although I don't know how much of the performance style is reconstructed.
There are a number of channels on YouTube which read old English texts in the actual Old English, the way they’d be read at the time. For some reason I enjoy this a lot. Could be because I like to track down the etymology of words, and understand why the language is the way it is, rather than just accept it in its current state. I feel like this helps me to better connect with the deeper meaning of the words and “feel” of the the language. GPT4 is pretty great at etymology btw.
Every year, for about 10 years, I have spent a month's holiday in Greece, in the Cyclades, in Crete.
Visiting Greece, especially the more remote regions, is an experience that I recommend to everyone.
It is a journey into the past that only some regions of the world can still offer.
There are places in the Peloponnese where you can really breathe in the history. Lately I've been very interested in ancient (and not so ancient) Greek music.
It's not easy to find really original sounds (not heavy modernization) so this post is really welcome.
Thank you
lm28469 5 hours ago [-]
It's true for most countries tbh, mass tourism became the norm but step out of it and you're in for an amazing time, even in your own country
BolexNOLA 3 hours ago [-]
Just remember that you are still a tourist in these places and be extra respectful!
aliasxneo 2 days ago [-]
Would you mind giving some additional recommendations? I found the music in this link captivating. I would love to hear more of these original sounds.
andoando 2 days ago [-]
Check out some Armenian music. We have a lot of practioners of the duduk for example which goes back 1500-2000 years.
That first video by Canberk Ulaş is a revelation. Wow. The music is as good as it gets. Albioni's music is sensational, and Canberk Ulaş plays with both artistic and technical mastery. The wind player in me freaks out seeing his cheeks blown out to cartoony proportions, which as I understand may be considered good form, but still.
andoando 2 days ago [-]
Its got a really unique harrowing sound. Heres some more if you like that.
Not op, but my main recommendation would be to visit greek in spring or autumn and not in summer, unless you really like it hot. Spring can be more wet, so late autumn, when most of the tourists are gone, but while it is still warm enough, would be my recommendation.
And Daemonia Nymphe for example would a greek band, that tries to reproduce the spirit of ancient greek music (not 1:1 reconstruction, but with authentic instruments).
The performances are great, the venue (a courtyard of the Venetian castle) is cool, and the host is warm and welcoming — we had a really good experience.
Also, in Athens, outside the Roman Forum site, the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments is really great, sometimes has performances, and the restaurants on that street are frequented by bouzouki players as well.
andsoitis 2 days ago [-]
If you go to an island like Paros and venture into small towns away from the tourist centers like Parikia and Naoussa, you will not only walk on ancient Byzantine roads but stumble upon a lot of traditional gatherings. Not quite platonic or Aristotelian, but still different enough from most western musical geometry.
buggythebug 2 days ago [-]
Shhh and don't tell anyone about mainland Greece yet to be disturbed by tourism even though it has always been very easily accessible
buggythebug 2 days ago [-]
Crete is not part of Cyclades
Clamchop 2 days ago [-]
There's a more charitable reading that you should probably give them given how much time they have spent in the region! It's a list of three distinct places: mainland Greece, the Cyclades, Crete.
dylan604 2 days ago [-]
Did you read over some of the punctuation? I did not read Cyclades as being part of Crete as written
giva 2 days ago [-]
It's subtle, as a non native english speaker I read it as a "zoom" too.
dylan604 2 days ago [-]
The the author is at fault for one's own misunderstanding? That's pretty egregious on it's own reading.
John23832 2 days ago [-]
I know this may just not be my cup of tea because I have the mind of an overly stimulated modern person... but that sounded awful.
dylan604 2 days ago [-]
The vocals definitely did not inspire me to want to find more. However, the guy playing the pipes toward the end was very impressive. The first person got short changed in showcasing his abilities. As someone that only played a woodwind instrument in middle school through high school, I never was able to do the circular breathing. This guy was impressive to me with his ability, and I did like the song as well. Then there was the conductor, but I always laugh at the mime-like performances they put on.
nicklecompte 2 days ago [-]
Beyond the bad acoustics, I think the real issue may have ultimately been the conductor. Those movements are more confusing than helpful, and seemed out of sync with the song.
But like everyone else, I don't want to be mean to researchers moonlighting as musicians. She did the job in terms of depicting what they think the music basically sounded like, and it's not reasonable to study conduction techniques for 4 years just so your team can make a better YouTube video.
There is also an acquired taste for non-standard tunings like the taste for beer. Some beers though are just bad.
nicklecompte 4 hours ago [-]
That's not a fair or relevant comparison. The OP is about ancient Greek music: the choir is singing a song derived from very old sheet music. The link you have is contemporary music inspired by Greek tunings. It's not at all the same thing.
poulsbohemian 2 days ago [-]
While I enjoyed it, perhaps use this as a device... imagine you'd never heard Bach, or Led Zeppelin, or whatever the kids are listening to these days. Imagine days ruled by the weather and timed by the sun. Where you aren't quite sure how we all got here but you certainly aren't going to do anything to anger the gods. Now imagine that music in context.
somenameforme 2 days ago [-]
I have a taste for folk music from just about every culture, and I wouldn't say much of it's an acquired taste. Most of it can sound alien, but still almost immediately pleasant. For instance the Chinese guqin [1] in China is basically nothing like anything else. The sound is quite unique but the style of play is just completely alien. Yet I think most would find it relaxing. Put yourself in the mindset of listening to that somewhere in nature, perhaps in front of a nice flowing stream.
The music from this topic sounded odd to me for a somewhat ironic reason - it felt far too contemporarily chorial, for me to imagine this is what Ancient Greek music would have sounded like. For contrast here [2] is Wardruna, a very popular Norwegian band that's driven by classical Norwegian traditions. So that would not only have been in an era like the one you're describing, but the song itself is also chorial in nature - yet the sound is extremely distinct.
These are not trained singers. They're off-rhythm, and off-key in ways that sheet music would not be able to convey.
"This is what ancient Greek music sounds like" is kind of like recording a restaurant version of happy birthday and saying that's what "modern Western music sounds like"
awfulneutral 2 days ago [-]
From this video it seems like there's no record of timing or emphasis, like you'd get with music transcribed today. So I wonder how close this was to how it sounded...if you take a familiar song, and just play the notes strung together with none of the right timing it might sound pretty unrecognizable.
John23832 2 days ago [-]
That's how I feel, it felt jumbled. No structure, either in tempo or between the instruments. I'm not sure that that would be recorded, so I'm pretty sure this couldn't be how this was actually performed.
This really just seems that its just how it "sounded".
coliveira 2 days ago [-]
From what we know, greek music followed the rhythm of the language, which had specific accentuation and different lengths for each syllable. From this one can reconstruct the rhythm, especially from ancient poetry such as the Iliad for example. Now, the tempo is another story, it is difficult to know why they decided on this.
awfulneutral 2 days ago [-]
Ah, that's interesting, thanks for the info!
oersted 2 days ago [-]
They don't sound like professionals, especially the singers. Fair enough, this is quite a niche research project, they are probably all academics that do this as a hobby.
Yes! This was the best part of the main documentary for me. Mr. Armstrong was killing it on those pipes (the aulos).
Seriously, thank you for posting this link. I hope your comment doesn't get buried.
soneca 2 days ago [-]
I enjoyed. Particularly that double-flute. A whole concert with that would be interesting. But I also enjoyed the chorus
poulsbohemian 2 days ago [-]
Chorus was excellent, but then again I used to sing medieval chat and whatnot so it felt very comfortable.
mrweasel 2 days ago [-]
It continues to fascinate me that music can sound/be perceived so differently. The flute was almost painful to listen to, with my ears. The chorus kinda rough as well, but I think that might just be the recording.
genman 2 days ago [-]
The same here, but I also listen to variety of music.
mock-possum 2 days ago [-]
I think there are some intentional reasons it sounds that way, but I think there are also some incidental reasons: The reverb in that venue is crazy - it really jumps out at me how much it sort of resolves to a tone of its own, which has to sometimes be dissonant with what’s being by played / sung. So what you’re hearing isn’t always in tune. Additionally, this is an expressive performance, so between the echo and the interpretative approach to the meter, what you’re hearing isn’t always in time either.
At least to my ears the actual recording of the flute sounded terrible as if the venue did not have a great mic set up. On my phone I had to blast the audio just to hear the flute but then the applause was super loud.
It certainly seems like the performance sounded much better live than it was recorded. The venue looks like it would have awesome acoustics for that type of performance. I don't know how much the (seemingly) poor recording quality affects your perception of the music.
samirillian 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, seems like they’re all scholars of music, they need some real musicians/composers.
hindsightbias 2 days ago [-]
Perhaps the one case where autotune might be appropriate.
openrisk 2 days ago [-]
An interesting question is how much of ancient greek music might be still with us (without being explicitly identified as such).
With the collapse of the ancient world and the spread of Christianity in the Eastern Med various elements of the Grecoroman civilization were actively supressed, but evidently not all (e.g. the language survived and evolved).
Some terminology around musical modes that developed in medieval Europe is attributed to ancient Greece but its not clear how close the musical connection between these two worlds.
On the other hand, Byzantine chant and a rich collection of folk musics are still practiced in the broader region and may be echoes of that earlier musical universe.
danans 2 days ago [-]
If you like this kind of stuff, you should listen to Peter Pringle singing the Epic of Gilgamesh while playing a reconstructed oud.
While the melodies/rhythms he uses are his creation, the words are from the epic itself which was itself 2000 years old by the time of Ancient Greece.
Peter Pringle is the shit, he makes tons of instruments for his songs!
https://youtu.be/ntnBuQAvFjA is also wonderful.
60secs 19 hours ago [-]
delightful!
bigyikes 2 days ago [-]
Someone in the video talks about Homer as though he were the author of the epics. My impression was that these epics came about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.
Maybe this idea was just put in my head by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? It’s a great book that was recommended to me by a HN comment last year.
Besides being all the more relevant in the age of non-conscious language models, the book also makes the case that Homeric epics were not created consciously. Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
Anyway, the video is neat, and it makes me all the more curious what it would’ve been like to hear one of these in 600 BC.
AdmiralAsshat 2 days ago [-]
That was the theory of Milman Parry, who made visits to Yugoslavia and other areas of Eastern Europe where oral poetry was still widely practiced, and noted similarities between the form of the existing traditions and that of Homer.
I haven't studied it seriously since college, but among evidence to support this theory is the idea that many of the titles used to describe the heroes may have been formulaic mnemonic aids that the singer/poet could keep in their back pocket and pull out during improvisation to fit the required meter.
linearrust 2 days ago [-]
> Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
There is nothing 'unconscious' about creating a long epic. It takes conscious effort especially if you expect it to be coherent and enjoyable. Besides, is there a connection between schizophrenia and metered speech? Wouldn't a schizophrenic epic be unmetered?
sdwr 2 days ago [-]
I kinda buy it. If you go back to Freud, he describes how impulses and desires are repressed and sublimated while the mind is functioning normally.
Tourette's is an example of the barrier between impulse and physical action being weakened.
Schizophrenia can be seen as the weakening of the barrier between impulse and belief.
Telling an epic story off-the-cuff requires weakening the barrier between your subconscious and speech
Personally, I think it's more likely that there was a collection of oral stories passed down by healthy people, each illustrating a specific real-life lesson, that got collected by one guy and stitched together. In the same way modern showrunners borrow scenes and references.
Like Achilles' heel is a warning against pride/arrogance, and the Cyclops and the sheep is a fun way to expose kids to possessive anger
beezlewax 2 days ago [-]
Freud "decided" a lot of things, and a lot of them are pure inventions of his fairly unique mind
andoando 2 days ago [-]
Why would you give me any credit to any of Freuds ideas? Im honestly astonished the guy has any kind of credibility.
bllguo 2 days ago [-]
this is quite hyperbolic. he has too complicated a legacy to dismiss this easily. some of the concepts he pioneered include talk therapy, transference, significance of early childhood on psychological development, the influence of the unconscious on behavior - all of which we accept today
andoando 2 days ago [-]
Was Freud really the first person to suggest talking to people about your problems can be therapeutic, or that the way you raise children affects them dramatically? As far as I am aware, the actual contents of the therapy he proposed, psychoanalysis, is complete bunk and no more effective than other forms of therapy.
I have a whole gripe with the "unconscious", unless all we mean by it is "past events affect who you are and affect your behavior" in which case I cant imagine Freud is the first person to have believed this.
ProjectArcturis 2 days ago [-]
>My impression was that these epics came about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.
This is the current scholarly consensus.
>Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
This is absolutely nuts. It could only be the result of someone reading Sperry and Gazzaniga's split brain experiments and deeply over-interpreting them.
neaden 2 days ago [-]
To be clear Jaynes is pure pseudo scientist, I don't think there is a neuroscientist, historian, anthropologist, or a classicist in the world who thinks he has any value. It's an interesting idea for a sci-fi setting like Westworld, but it's rubbish.
coldtea 2 days ago [-]
>Someone in the video talks about Homer as though he were the author of the epics. My impression was that these epics came about via oral tradition, with centuries of recitation by bards.
That the epics pre-existed is true, that Homer was a singular author with specific "voice" (not just someone who wrote them down) is debated (and favored iirc).
>Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
Yes, that part is bs.
adrian_b 2 days ago [-]
The claim of not being created consciously seems much more applicable to many of the scripts of recent movies than to the Homeric Epics.
The main plot lines of the epics, which are quite clever, must have been designed consciously and whoever did that should be considered the main creators of the epics. I am among those who believe that the main authors of Iliad and Odyssey must have been distinct, but they probably were members of the same family, e.g. the main author of the Odyssey might have been a niece or granddaughter of "Homer".
In any case while the main authors have devised the plots, they have expressed the plot using a huge amount of verse sequences, metaphors and similes inherited via oral tradition from their ancestors and the selection of a verse sequence appropriate for a certain point in the story might have been partially non-deterministic and unconscious.
Once the initial versions of the epics had been performed, it is likely that all later public performances by the main authors or by their descendants have never repeated completely identically, but with small variations in verse choices, until they have been fixed in writing. It is possible that multiple variants have been fixed in writing or the copists have made various mistakes, because the canonical variants known today have been edited in their final form only many hundreds of years later.
Interesting anecdote that I am not entirely sure is true, is that “classical music” genre got its name because music was the only art that we didn’t know how it was in Ancient Greece and Rome, where the term “classic” is usually applied to.
So, by the time people were rediscovering the music of Bach and that type of music was growing in popularity, people decided to use “classical” for that sort of music.
tgv 1 days ago [-]
It's somewhat "not even wrong." It's true the term classical refers back to the classical period, but it was explicitly adopted following Baroque. The style of the late 18th, early 19th century was named Classical. The rediscovery of Bach is unrelated.
Western music history roughly goes like: early polyphony, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern (where e.g. Romantic has subdivisions, and you could argue Modern is over or has many subdivisions, etc.).
The current use of the term "classical music" refers to all serious, composed music.
primitivesuave 2 days ago [-]
Related: Sid Meier used a modern rendition of the First Delphic Hymns to Apollo (the earliest known instance of recorded sheet music) as the background music in Civilization 3.
"Founded at the beginning of the 90s, the Ensemble Kérylos, directed by Annie Bélis, is dedicated to Ancient Greek and Roman Music. It plays only authentic scores as accurately as possible, using instruments that are faithfully reconstructed."
billbrown 2 days ago [-]
There's also Michael Levy who is composing new music for ancient instruments[1] as well as playing the oldest song "Epitaph of Seikilos" on a kithara[2]
Reminds me of what my friend who studied classics said: that we don’t know for sure how Greek and Latin actually sounded like in ancient times.
nescioquid 2 days ago [-]
Giving your friend the benefit of the doubt, sometimes one gets the wrong perspective from a careful, qualified statement.
W. Sidney Allen wrote Vox Graeca[1] and Vox Latina which are well-known works which detail both what we know about pronunciation as well as explaining how we came to know these things. We surely don't know everything and scholarship evolves, but it is hardly like what you seem to be suggesting.
It is interesting to know about some of the sources: ancient grammarians wrote about pronunciation, people poked fun at how other people talked in letters, epigraphers sometimes made mistakes on the order of "could of".
That performance around the 8m40s mark is truly impressive.
enriquto 2 days ago [-]
I'm really confused by the aulos... How does such a short pipe produce these low notes? By the looks of it I would expect it to sound two octaves higher.
alamortsubite 2 days ago [-]
Indeed. The first aulete touches on this. He mentions the bore of his deer-bone pipes is larger than that of later double-pipes, which were made of wood, and when the second aulete plays the latter, the pitch is notably sharper. Not a thorough explanation of the perceived disparity, but the instruments might also seem a bit shorter on video than they actually are.
Oarch 2 days ago [-]
Also check out modern recreations of the hydraulis.
A unique Ancient Greek instrument that was apparently the early forerunner of the organ.
TheRealPomax 2 days ago [-]
Title should be "Rediscovering Ancient Greek Music (2017)"
That's not why I changed the current URL. As for Twitter links in general - it's a mess right now. A lot of significant content only exists in that form, so I wouldn't go so far as to say they're discouraged; but it's good to check if a better / more accessible source with the same information is available.
galaxyofdoom 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
bboygravity 2 days ago [-]
Thanks for the original link, X videos load way faster and with less bloat than Youtube videos for me.
system2 2 days ago [-]
Don't you use adblockers?
drooopy 2 days ago [-]
I have some very basic understanding of greek, so I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. But the way that they pronounce (sing) diphthongs is not quite right and I feel that makes the song sound... rougher somehow.
titanomachy 2 days ago [-]
They are also probably trying to reproduce Ancient Greek pronunciation, which treats diphthongs differently. I believe in Ancient Greek the sounds were pronounced closer to how they are spelled, and the collapse into diphthongs happened later (nt -> d, mp -> b, ai -> e, etc.).
verisimi 2 days ago [-]
No one knows, nor could they ever know.
baruz 2 days ago [-]
There is plenty of evidence, well documented, of how ancient Greek languages, and Attic in particular, sounded. Transliterations of Latin, Egyptian, Persian names, and words taken from other languages, and Latin transliterations of Greek names and words. Non-orthographic spellings and misspellings. Rhymes and the preservation of supersegmental qualities in poetry. Grammarians describing in detail how likely barbarians were to mispronounce certain words and how to best pronounce words. There's more to learn, but it's not unknowable.
swatcoder 2 days ago [-]
To some degree that's true, to some degree it's not.
Given enough of the right samples and their context, you can make strong informed guesses about pronunciation from how words are used in structured samples like poetry/plays that embed rhythm, rhyme, etc in established ways; from patterns in the way words shift over time; etc
There are quite a lot of signals you can feel confident drawing from, but of course you can't get to 100% accuracy even if you had perfect insight or even heard the word spoken because pronunciation does still vary by individual, family, community, context, etc
I don't know what's right here myself or how established the consensus is around what might be right, but the discussion you're responding to isn't frivolous or unreasonable on its face.
verisimi 1 days ago [-]
Consensus has nothing to do with how one can know what things sounded like 2000 years ago, when we have no means to verify anything.
The consensus might be bang on. Or it might be wildly wrong. Or something else. Who can say?
My point is a pretty straightforward one. To say you have knowledge of a thing, you need to be able to personally verify whatever-it-is. I can personally verify I'm sitting in a chair. I can never verify that music sounded like that 2000 years ago, cos I was not there. I can read a book that describes the sound, but that still doesn't mean I can verify it!
"We" cannot know a thing - there may be a consensus opinion (the wisdom of crowds and all that) - it might be a good guess - but this is not knowledge. And can never be.
This doesn't take away from the fun endeavour though. If you want to recreate sounds from the descriptions given in text, go ahead - I'll listen to it.
swatcoder 1 days ago [-]
Epistemology is tricky, isn't it?
By your standard, most of us also don't "know" that the Civil War happened or that there is a vacuum in space. It's deductions, inductions, personal attestations, and consensuses all the way down. Yet, to navigate a modern world that presents itself as scientific and evidence-based, most of us adopt beliefs about these things -- sometimes with much stubbornness and sometimes very lightly -- and call these things "knowledge" too.
You can be a stickler about your use of the term, but the more you are, the more distanced you find yourself from common usage, the more needlessly contentious and pedantic discussions become, and the more you're left to come up with your own language to describe all the usages you've chosen to reject.
verisimi 24 hours ago [-]
Right - I'm more distanced from common usage, for sure.
On the other hand, my assessments and understanding is my own. My brain is not "outsourced" to consensus or experts. I'm fine with that!
I'm interested to see if you have a suggestion that would draw this distinction out better. The idea that something can be 'known' at large by a group, and the idea that the individual 'knows' because he has personally verified something. Are both these really "knowledge"? Can knowledge be a team sport? Is knowledge what the person with the biggest megaphone, or the most supporters say it is?
I'm also interested to hear a better term than 'know', for those things that the individual has verified vs what you would call (group) "knowledge" - but I personally think my 'hard' definition is the proper one. One knows, or one believes (or theorises/hypothesises/etc). It might (or might not) be fair/useful to hold consensus opinion - but, as far as the individual is concerned this type of information ought to be characterised as 'belief'.
I'm sure you can tell, but I think knowledge (all thinking and emotions actually) occur in the individual only. A generic "we" cannot know anything - knowledge is enlivened in the individual mind only.
I think this is all self-evident, but I'm always happy to hear alternative views, better definitions of terms, etc. I invite you to explain further and correct me!
jhanschoo 1 days ago [-]
> Consensus has nothing to do with how one can know what things sounded like 2000 years ago, when we have no means to verify anything.
The consensus might be bang on. Or it might be wildly wrong. Or something else. Who can say?
Neither can a person who has never left the US who realistically would not visit France verify whether they are speaking French as is spoken in Marseilles. Yet the effort to approximate it is not futile, and having practiced with a native French speaker from Marseilles to the point of fluency is usually proof enough for many to say that they know French as is spoken in Marseilles, even though it seems to me that you would not regard this as knowledge.
verisimi 1 days ago [-]
If you doubted that they speak French in Marseilles, you could go and verify it.
How do you propose one verifies how music sounded 2000 years ago?
scrollaway 1 days ago [-]
This mindset is what gives us flat earthers and moon landing deniers. “Can’t check myself, so it’s false and science is bullshit”.
verisimi 1 days ago [-]
Its actually logic.
There really are some things that cannot be known. It is valuable and useful to distinguish between belief/hypothesis and knowledge.
The worst thing, imo, is to believe that one knows when one is a state of belief - this is the curiosity killer.
2 days ago [-]
jb1991 1 days ago [-]
> the way that they pronounce (sing) diphthongs is not quite right
I find it amusing that you say you have a “very basic understanding“ of Greek and then judge whether a team from Oxford who has been studying this for many years is pronouncing it correctly.
maxglute 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 15:48:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
And that pipe music was fantastic. Reminds me a lot of the style of Colin Stetson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra-EsJpkG9o
Ioannis Stratakis at Podium-Arts https://ancientgreek.eu/ mostly records in reconstructed Classical Greek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSbyr6ah0h8 .
The pipe music instantly reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=616PssEzrqo
Visiting Greece, especially the more remote regions, is an experience that I recommend to everyone.
It is a journey into the past that only some regions of the world can still offer.
There are places in the Peloponnese where you can really breathe in the history. Lately I've been very interested in ancient (and not so ancient) Greek music.
It's not easy to find really original sounds (not heavy modernization) so this post is really welcome.
Thank you
https://youtu.be/E2q5PZqqZek?si=nV-_ESM3BT4dDTzK
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z2KglJSZGZE&pp=ygUWYW5jaWVudCB...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PluzIW9LKSE&list=OLAK5uy_kqaRp...
And Daemonia Nymphe for example would a greek band, that tries to reproduce the spirit of ancient greek music (not 1:1 reconstruction, but with authentic instruments).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemonia_Nymphe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRxEXasEDj8
And I also can recommend crete. I camped wild next to an old temples there, which was otherwise occupied by goats. Interesting experience.
The performances are great, the venue (a courtyard of the Venetian castle) is cool, and the host is warm and welcoming — we had a really good experience.
Also, in Athens, outside the Roman Forum site, the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments is really great, sometimes has performances, and the restaurants on that street are frequented by bouzouki players as well.
But like everyone else, I don't want to be mean to researchers moonlighting as musicians. She did the job in terms of depicting what they think the music basically sounded like, and it's not reasonable to study conduction techniques for 4 years just so your team can make a better YouTube video.
Harry Partch - 2 Studies on Ancient Greek Scales is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6IinoChSVA
There is also an acquired taste for non-standard tunings like the taste for beer. Some beers though are just bad.
The music from this topic sounded odd to me for a somewhat ironic reason - it felt far too contemporarily chorial, for me to imagine this is what Ancient Greek music would have sounded like. For contrast here [2] is Wardruna, a very popular Norwegian band that's driven by classical Norwegian traditions. So that would not only have been in an era like the one you're describing, but the song itself is also chorial in nature - yet the sound is extremely distinct.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmEHN82admY
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6RCY-G-NlA
actually reminds me quite a bit of the sitar!
"This is what ancient Greek music sounds like" is kind of like recording a restaurant version of happy birthday and saying that's what "modern Western music sounds like"
This really just seems that its just how it "sounded".
Although I really enjoyed this part: https://youtu.be/4hOK7bU0S1Y?si=4ImysYmjramsxsKX&t=498
Seriously, thank you for posting this link. I hope your comment doesn't get buried.
Like ass. Ass and kazoo.
It certainly seems like the performance sounded much better live than it was recorded. The venue looks like it would have awesome acoustics for that type of performance. I don't know how much the (seemingly) poor recording quality affects your perception of the music.
With the collapse of the ancient world and the spread of Christianity in the Eastern Med various elements of the Grecoroman civilization were actively supressed, but evidently not all (e.g. the language survived and evolved).
Some terminology around musical modes that developed in medieval Europe is attributed to ancient Greece but its not clear how close the musical connection between these two worlds.
On the other hand, Byzantine chant and a rich collection of folk musics are still practiced in the broader region and may be echoes of that earlier musical universe.
While the melodies/rhythms he uses are his creation, the words are from the epic itself which was itself 2000 years old by the time of Ancient Greece.
https://youtu.be/QUcTsFe1PVs?si=VvXGMhmoNwtz67Ld
Maybe this idea was just put in my head by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? It’s a great book that was recommended to me by a HN comment last year.
Besides being all the more relevant in the age of non-conscious language models, the book also makes the case that Homeric epics were not created consciously. Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
Anyway, the video is neat, and it makes me all the more curious what it would’ve been like to hear one of these in 600 BC.
I haven't studied it seriously since college, but among evidence to support this theory is the idea that many of the titles used to describe the heroes may have been formulaic mnemonic aids that the singer/poet could keep in their back pocket and pull out during improvisation to fit the required meter.
There is nothing 'unconscious' about creating a long epic. It takes conscious effort especially if you expect it to be coherent and enjoyable. Besides, is there a connection between schizophrenia and metered speech? Wouldn't a schizophrenic epic be unmetered?
Tourette's is an example of the barrier between impulse and physical action being weakened.
Schizophrenia can be seen as the weakening of the barrier between impulse and belief.
Telling an epic story off-the-cuff requires weakening the barrier between your subconscious and speech
Personally, I think it's more likely that there was a collection of oral stories passed down by healthy people, each illustrating a specific real-life lesson, that got collected by one guy and stitched together. In the same way modern showrunners borrow scenes and references.
Like Achilles' heel is a warning against pride/arrogance, and the Cyclops and the sheep is a fun way to expose kids to possessive anger
I have a whole gripe with the "unconscious", unless all we mean by it is "past events affect who you are and affect your behavior" in which case I cant imagine Freud is the first person to have believed this.
This is the current scholarly consensus.
>Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
This is absolutely nuts. It could only be the result of someone reading Sperry and Gazzaniga's split brain experiments and deeply over-interpreting them.
That the epics pre-existed is true, that Homer was a singular author with specific "voice" (not just someone who wrote them down) is debated (and favored iirc).
>Instead, Jaynes claims, these poems originated in the unconscious right hemisphere and were blindly recited by those who could not ignore the metered, schizophrenic prose forced upon them by their bicameral mind.
Yes, that part is bs.
The main plot lines of the epics, which are quite clever, must have been designed consciously and whoever did that should be considered the main creators of the epics. I am among those who believe that the main authors of Iliad and Odyssey must have been distinct, but they probably were members of the same family, e.g. the main author of the Odyssey might have been a niece or granddaughter of "Homer".
In any case while the main authors have devised the plots, they have expressed the plot using a huge amount of verse sequences, metaphors and similes inherited via oral tradition from their ancestors and the selection of a verse sequence appropriate for a certain point in the story might have been partially non-deterministic and unconscious.
Once the initial versions of the epics had been performed, it is likely that all later public performances by the main authors or by their descendants have never repeated completely identically, but with small variations in verse choices, until they have been fixed in writing. It is possible that multiple variants have been fixed in writing or the copists have made various mistakes, because the canonical variants known today have been edited in their final form only many hundreds of years later.
So, by the time people were rediscovering the music of Bach and that type of music was growing in popularity, people decided to use “classical” for that sort of music.
Western music history roughly goes like: early polyphony, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern (where e.g. Romantic has subdivisions, and you could argue Modern is over or has many subdivisions, etc.).
The current use of the term "classical music" refers to all serious, composed music.
https://youtu.be/0iwPolnMXEc?si=ZlVPcClhT_aOK4tu&t=55
"Founded at the beginning of the 90s, the Ensemble Kérylos, directed by Annie Bélis, is dedicated to Ancient Greek and Roman Music. It plays only authentic scores as accurately as possible, using instruments that are faithfully reconstructed."
[1] https://ancientlyre.com/ [2] https://michaellevy.bandcamp.com/track/epitaph-of-seikilos-c...
W. Sidney Allen wrote Vox Graeca[1] and Vox Latina which are well-known works which detail both what we know about pronunciation as well as explaining how we came to know these things. We surely don't know everything and scholarship evolves, but it is hardly like what you seem to be suggesting.
It is interesting to know about some of the sources: ancient grammarians wrote about pronunciation, people poked fun at how other people talked in letters, epigraphers sometimes made mistakes on the order of "could of".
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/classi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3AbylWGjog&list=PL-7hwegJPk...
A unique Ancient Greek instrument that was apparently the early forerunner of the organ.
Given enough of the right samples and their context, you can make strong informed guesses about pronunciation from how words are used in structured samples like poetry/plays that embed rhythm, rhyme, etc in established ways; from patterns in the way words shift over time; etc
There are quite a lot of signals you can feel confident drawing from, but of course you can't get to 100% accuracy even if you had perfect insight or even heard the word spoken because pronunciation does still vary by individual, family, community, context, etc
I don't know what's right here myself or how established the consensus is around what might be right, but the discussion you're responding to isn't frivolous or unreasonable on its face.
The consensus might be bang on. Or it might be wildly wrong. Or something else. Who can say?
My point is a pretty straightforward one. To say you have knowledge of a thing, you need to be able to personally verify whatever-it-is. I can personally verify I'm sitting in a chair. I can never verify that music sounded like that 2000 years ago, cos I was not there. I can read a book that describes the sound, but that still doesn't mean I can verify it!
"We" cannot know a thing - there may be a consensus opinion (the wisdom of crowds and all that) - it might be a good guess - but this is not knowledge. And can never be.
This doesn't take away from the fun endeavour though. If you want to recreate sounds from the descriptions given in text, go ahead - I'll listen to it.
By your standard, most of us also don't "know" that the Civil War happened or that there is a vacuum in space. It's deductions, inductions, personal attestations, and consensuses all the way down. Yet, to navigate a modern world that presents itself as scientific and evidence-based, most of us adopt beliefs about these things -- sometimes with much stubbornness and sometimes very lightly -- and call these things "knowledge" too.
You can be a stickler about your use of the term, but the more you are, the more distanced you find yourself from common usage, the more needlessly contentious and pedantic discussions become, and the more you're left to come up with your own language to describe all the usages you've chosen to reject.
On the other hand, my assessments and understanding is my own. My brain is not "outsourced" to consensus or experts. I'm fine with that!
I'm interested to see if you have a suggestion that would draw this distinction out better. The idea that something can be 'known' at large by a group, and the idea that the individual 'knows' because he has personally verified something. Are both these really "knowledge"? Can knowledge be a team sport? Is knowledge what the person with the biggest megaphone, or the most supporters say it is?
I'm also interested to hear a better term than 'know', for those things that the individual has verified vs what you would call (group) "knowledge" - but I personally think my 'hard' definition is the proper one. One knows, or one believes (or theorises/hypothesises/etc). It might (or might not) be fair/useful to hold consensus opinion - but, as far as the individual is concerned this type of information ought to be characterised as 'belief'.
I'm sure you can tell, but I think knowledge (all thinking and emotions actually) occur in the individual only. A generic "we" cannot know anything - knowledge is enlivened in the individual mind only.
I think this is all self-evident, but I'm always happy to hear alternative views, better definitions of terms, etc. I invite you to explain further and correct me!
Neither can a person who has never left the US who realistically would not visit France verify whether they are speaking French as is spoken in Marseilles. Yet the effort to approximate it is not futile, and having practiced with a native French speaker from Marseilles to the point of fluency is usually proof enough for many to say that they know French as is spoken in Marseilles, even though it seems to me that you would not regard this as knowledge.
How do you propose one verifies how music sounded 2000 years ago?
There really are some things that cannot be known. It is valuable and useful to distinguish between belief/hypothesis and knowledge.
The worst thing, imo, is to believe that one knows when one is a state of belief - this is the curiosity killer.
I find it amusing that you say you have a “very basic understanding“ of Greek and then judge whether a team from Oxford who has been studying this for many years is pronouncing it correctly.