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Five Ways To Listen To The Music Of The Ancient World Today

This article is more than 6 years old.

We are often immersed in what the ancient world looked like when we visit a museum or an archaeological site. However, the vibrant soundscapes heard at festivals, funerals, courtly feasts, theatrical performances, gladiatorial shows or just while shopping in the ancient world are important to reconstructing the past. A number of ancient historians are hard at work to bring the music of antiquity back to life for the enjoyment of the modern world. Here are just a few samples to listen to.

Public Domain via Wikimedia

Ancient Greek Music: Historian of ancient music Armand D'Angour recently posted the first choral performance with an aulos (a Greek wind instrument akin to a flute) of scores originally written by two ancient authors. The first is a Delphic Paean by the ancient musician Athenaeus (127 BCE) and the second is composed by the playwright Euripides for the chorus in his tragedy Orestes (408 BCE). Each shows the import of music in rituals of Greek worship and within the context of theatrical performance: 

You can listen to musician and historian Stefan Hagel try and play a reconstruction of an aulos from the Louvre below and read about how he reconstructed the instrument--called a tibia in Latin--here.

Ancient Roman Military Music: Songs were often written for religious festivals or drama in antiquity, but they were also an integral part of the ancient military's ability to move in formation. Musicians had an important job within the Roman army. The military writer Vegetius tells us they played a number of horns: the tuba, bucina and a large wrap-around horn called the cornu. There were also flautists that played tibiae. Together with the military standards, there was a system of sound and standards that signaled to soldiers how to move, when and how fast. 

Although very little of these instruments survive today (usually just the mouthpieces), an example of a cornu and portions of various tibiae do survive from Pompeii. This archaeological evidence, along with ancient literature and the artistic rendering of musicians from mosaics, epitaphs and monuments like Trajan's column, have helped musicians to reconstruct what these instruments looked like---even if the music itself can be a bit speculative. Music was also a part of gladiatorial fights, where pseudo-military encoutners could be viewed by the masses for entertainment. The cornu was an important part of signaling gladiatorial matches and organizing fight dockets through sound:

Ancient Chinese Court Music: The Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) of ancient China created a luscious musical atmosphere complete with stunning court dancers and choreography accompanied by flutes, drums, the qin (a Chinese zither) and many other instruments. That is why this period is often referred to as the Golden Age of Chinese music. The performance of yayue (banquet music and dances) was a particularly integral part of feasting ceremonies at court that emphasized the power of the emperor and reached all the way back to the Zhou dynasty. Since the 1990s in particular, a number of Chinese reconstructions of the music and dance from the Tang dynasty have gone online: 

Ancient Mesopotamian Songs: Music played an important part in ancient Mesopotamian society. A few years back, composer Stef Conner teamed up with renowned lyre player Andy Lowings in order to reconstruct Babylonian music from cuneiform tablets. What resulted was an album called The Flood. As with a lot of reconstructions of ancient music, the intonations and musical scores are highly educated guesses, but Connor was influenced in part by emerita Assyriologist Anne Draffkorn Kilmer. After many painstaking years of study, Prof. Kilmer recreated a Hurrian hymn to Nikkal from a clay tablet found at Ugarit dating to around 1400 BCE. The hymn has been dubbed the "oldest song in the world." You can listen to it here:

These are just a few reconstructions of ancient music to enjoy once you get sick of the Christmas tunes running on loop at your local mall. The incredible amount of research and work that has gone into these performances is notable even if each piece is rather short. It is this important reconstructive work that allows us--along with the recreation of the smells of the ancient world--to begin to conjure the ephemeral multi-sensory landscapes of antiquity that cannot really be preserved in dirt.

 

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