Origins Of Western Music

Essays on the Origins of Western Music

by

John Smithers

Essay Nr. 70: What was quaint Greek Music Like?

It is impossible for us today to recover the meaning
of this dead music of antique Greece.
total heat S. Macran, 1974

When modern musicology was founded in the 19th century a finish was made that you foundation only study music if you deem the actual music in front of you. It is for this reason that or so books on Renaissance music, for example, are al nigh entirely modified to discussion of Roman Church music and the secular sing types. The fact is that relatively few men living in the Renaissance would have ever heard any of that music. Ironic onlyy, thither are abundant contemporary sources which discuss in full point what Renaissance music practice was really like.
This is the problem with ancient Greek music. From the Golden Age of Greece, the period of the lyric poets, Socrates, the grand playwrights and Aristotle, no music survives. What has survived is a small body of melodies and fragments notated in a primitive alphabetic notation from only the most recent period of ancient Greece, the so-called “Roman check of Ancient Greece,” (146 BC – 529 AD) a period long afterward the interesting centuries and a period identified by all writers as one of cultural decline.



Therefore, music historians have mostly thrown up their hands and declared that nothing can be known of Greek music. The quotation above is voice of that viewpoint.
But a careful reading of Greek literary works actually reveals much about ancient Greek music. First, at that place must have been similarities between the musical practice of the former civilizations of Egypt and ancient Greece. The relations between Egypt and Greece can be record to very remote times, as, for example, in the case of Danaus, a apparent brother to Amunoph III, who left Egypt and founded Argos, where he died in 1,425 BC. With the reign of Psammetichus I, Egypt, which had been a rather...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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