Music of Greece: Discovering Ancient Melodies

This is Culture of Greece. The past is present. I'm John Franklin. I teach about ancient Greece at the University of Vermont. In this segment we talk about bringing ancient music back from the dead. Did you see Jurassic Park? Have you ever read Frankenstein? Have you ever held a seance with your friends and tried to summon the spirits of the dead? Of course, those things are just fantasy. But there are people who do do this every day. That's me and my computer you're hearing. We do this with ancient Greek music. I've been studying this stuff for 12 years and I've spent thousands of hours working on it. You get hooked, eventually, on just trying to solve what the puzzles are. You're reading through lots of ancient texts. You've got to study difficult, dead languages. You've also got to read hundreds of books and articles written in German, French and Italian. And you've got to pick out what seems right or what's wrong and put it all together into some kind of coherent picture. And at the end of the day, it's for a kind of music that, for the most part, you're not ever going to know what it sounded like. Of course, there are over 60 small pieces or fragments, we call them, of ancient music which actually have survived. It's amazing that so many pieces survived. Phil Newman is someone else who tries to recreate this kind of music. His group is called Ensemble d'Organographie. They perform those fragments which survive and which are big enough to give you some kind of a satisfying performance. The earliest one of those ancient Greek pieces is about 2,500 years old. That's actually quite amazing. Playing this piece by Euripides, it was written in the 5th century B.C., it's not like being able to sit down at the piano and bang out a tune from a high school musical off of the sheet music. It's not that it's much harder than that. It's not like playing a sonata by Beethoven or something like that. It's just that there's so little information about the music to go on. First of all, most of the music that was ever written in antiquity has not survived. And even if it has survived, like this Euripides song, the music can be in pretty rough condition. It's written on papyrus, which has crumbled away or rotted over the years, so there's holes, literally holes, in the music. Think of taking a piece of sheet music, throwing it in the fireplace, pulling it out again, and trying to figure out what was on there originally. Other pieces, it's not so difficult if they were inscribed on stone to start with. And in other cases, it may have been written in manuscripts and copied over the ages, and those manuscripts may survive. So all is not completely hopeless. Gail Holst Warhaft is director of Mediterranean studies at Cornell University. She talks about one of the more famous fragments of music, the so-called Sikilas Song. It was inscribed on a tombstone, and it's a song about living life to the fullest. The first line is, While you live, shine. Gail believes it was put there for people who came to visit the grave. And so we're able, when they walk by the grave, to sit there and sing the song. It's a nice idea to have a little musical song there on your grave to encourage people to sing instead of weep on you too. Even when we do have a piece of music that is in relatively good condition, let's say we have pretty much a complete piece of ancient music in the ideal state, there's still so much information that we're not given. All we have is a notation of the melody. But anything about the tempo, or the arrangement of the instruments, or chords, or anything like that, we have to supply ourselves. As Gail Holst Warhaft says, it forces us to do a lot of guesswork. Sometimes we have some rhythmic indications which come from lyrics and so on, but we don't have the whole picture. A couple of the pieces have been known continuously since antiquity, if they were written in manuscripts and copied over the ages. But most of them were only discovered in the 19th and 20th century, and most of them on papyrus fragments that come from the sands of Egypt. Before this, most of what we knew about Greek music was indirect, statements made off the cuff by philosophers like Plato or Aristotle or other Greek writers. Of course, we also had a large number of theoretical treatises. These are things that deal with scale systems and tonal relationships. But in many cases, the people that wrote these sorts of things weren't actually practicing musicians. They certainly obviously listened to music and knew what was going on when they listened to it, but the people who actually played those instruments were not the people who wrote about it. Most of the music that was played in ancient Greece or in any ancient culture was never written down. I mean, just as today, people play in pubs or at parties, and they just play the music. There's no need to write it down. You only get that when you've got some special occasion, like the Sykala song, where you want to remember the song on your gravestone, so you put it on stone. Or if you're doing a tragedy or a comedy, and you need to teach the people how to sing it. But that didn't happen very often. Again, here's Gail Holst Warheft. Music was something that was played by ear, and as is often the tradition in oral cultures, it was just simply not thought necessary to write it down by the people who were actually doing it. Music What you're hearing now is called the Hymn to Nemesis. It was written by a composer named Mesomedes, who worked for the Emperor Hadrian in the 1st century AD. And I've just taken the melody that we have given to us, and I've filled in all the blanks, based on things I've read about what instruments played together, and so on. And I've used a lot of computer software that people normally use for pop music production, so sampling and looping, overdubbing, and so on, to fill in the blanks. So even though we don't have that information given to us, we're not working totally in the dark when we supply it ourselves, if we do a bit of homework. One of the most fascinating parts of ancient Greek music are the complex rhythms that it uses. Phil Newman explains. A number of the ancient Greek pieces are in odd meters, and so what that means is that rather than being in time signatures that we're used to, like 4-4 or 3-4, some of these we would call them being in 5-4 or 8-8. There's actually two pieces that are in 15-8. Music And the beats aren't all the same size. They alternate in groups of twos and threes. One of the ways that the measures are divided are in 2 plus 3, so thinking 1-2-3-4-5, the accents fall on 1 and 3, so it's like 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5. Even though some of these pieces use very complicated rhythms, we can figure out what those are, because those rhythms come from the text itself. Ancient Greek, like Chinese, used a sort of pitch accent, so I'll give you one example, the opening line of the Odyssey. Andromoenne pemusa politro ponhos mala So we can see that the way the voice is rising and falling there often gets mirrored by the melodies that they give to us, and this lets us write new melodies in the ancient style for those poems that don't have melodies, which survive. Metemetemes etetem The material that we have comes from over a thousand year period, and we have only 60 little sort of snippets from that whole period. The 5th century BC is when all the big famous names were active. We have Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Pindar, and we have only the tiniest bit from that period. We heard the piece by Euripides, and we have one other by him, but again, a tiny fragment. The great majority of what we do have comes from later centuries, and most of it from the AD centuries. I mean, think how much music has changed since the birth of rock and roll in the 50s. That's only 40 or 50 years. We're talking about a thousand year stretch here. As Phil Newman says, they don't all sound quite alike, so it's not just a matter of following some sort of generalized ancient Greek style, but also the practices of each of those periods within that span. When I'm doing my versions of these things, I mean, I'm not an instrument builder. I can barely hammer a nail into a piece of wood. But I have had training with electronic music and popular music production, and so I combine that with these Greek music fragments. I take the melodies and rhythms that we know about, and I mix them up. I put beats behind them. I use samples of replica instruments that friends of mine have made. I'll put in modern instruments. I'm trying to sort of bring them to the present day. I'm not trying to do anything too scholarly or accurate about it. I just want to have fun with it. Thanks for listening. I'm John Franklin from the University of Vermont for ArtsEdge, program of the Education Department of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.