What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction (2013)

Original, for those who don't like retold news:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24611454

Especially when the original is written by the author of the research.

German band Corvus Corax recorded a version of this tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-4vF5JYxk

They play ancient and medieval vernacular music on largely self made authentic instruments. Their approach is that at the time, it was probably played by and for young people having a good time, rather than professors in music history, so their shows are loud and energetic.

This is why I'm not really worried about automation meaning the end of work. The fact that we have automation is what enables people to work on these sorts of problems, rather than being out in the fields picking bugs off of their crops and hoping the rains come.

This is not at all new news. We've known how to transcribe Greek notation since at least the early 20th century (and probably long before that; my memory of Greek music theory is failing me this morning). This particular piece is one of Greek music's greatest hits, and has been in standard music history anthologies for at least 30 years or so, I'd imagine.

It's also not at all apparent that the Greeks used the mathematically pure ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 9:8) consistently in real music. One of the earliest debates in music theory is whether we should trust the ratios or the ear: Aristoxenus was advocating in the 4th c. BCE for a phenomenological view of intervals.

(And Ptolemy, whose intervals are supposedly used in this recording, had some truly bizarre scales in his text. He only allowed superparticular interval ratios, and so the standard Pythagorean semitone of 256:243 appears nowhere in his text.)

It's the so-called Seikilos epitaph (I think the name means "Man from Sicily"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph

Interesting historical anecdote, from the wikipedia article:

According to another source the stele [inscribed with the song], having first been discovered during the building of the railway next to Aidin, had first remained at the possession of the building firm's director Edward Purser, where Ramsay found and published about it; in about 1893, as it "was broken at the bottom, its base was sawn off straight so that it could stand and serve as a pedestal for Mrs Purser's flowerpots"; this caused the loss of one line of text, i.e., while the stele would now stand upright, the grinding had obliterated the last line of the inscription.

For those who play Civilization V, the brilliant leader music for Greece is based on this tune.