Greek music
The musical culture of ancient Greece is known more through literary
references than through preserved musical documents.About 20 fragments of music are extant written in a relatively late Greek notational
system, but references to music performed at various rites and social occasions
abound in the works of ancient Greek authors. Consequently,
most modern discussions of Greek music either speculate about the sound
of the music itself, or deal with the role and nature of music in that society.
Dance, poetry, rite, and music seem inseparably associated in the early
history of music in ancient Greece.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey report vintners' songs, dirges, and hymns of praise to Apollo (paeans). Music
was described as an art exerting great power (ethos) over human beings,
and certain musical styles came to be associated with particular peoples
and deities.,came to be linked
with Apollo, the god of the Sun and reason, while the aulos, a loud
double-reed instrument, came to be identified with Dionysus, the god of wine
and ecstatic revelry. The most important of mythic musicians in ancient
Greek culture was ORPHEUS, whose music had the power to cause inanimate
objects to move and even influence the forces of Hades.
- Kithara
- A plucked string instrument.
- Terapander of lesbos
- The founder of lyric kithara performance.
- Pindar of thebes
- represent the rise of greek choral music.
- Timotheus of Miletus
- a virtuoso performer on the kithara whose inventions
contributed to his infamy as well as fame.
Among the earliest Greek musicians whose existence and accomplishments
seem to be rooted in reality as well as legend are Terpander of Lesbos
(7th century BC), PINDAR of Thebes (6th-5th century BC), and Timotheus of Miletus (5th-4th century BC),
. The musical and lyrical tradition represented by these
personalities reached its apex in the Athenian drama of the 5th and 4th centuries BC,
a dramatic tradition in which solo and choral singing, instrumental music,
and dance all played essential roles.
Although many names of musicians are recorded in ancient sources,
none played a more important role in the development of Greek musical thought
than the mathematician and philosopher PYTHAGORAS OF SAMOS (6th-5th
century BC). According to legend, Pythagoras, by divine guidance,
discovered the mathematical rationale of musical consonance from the
weights of hammers used by smiths. He is thus given credit for
discovering that the interval of an octave is rooted in the ratio 2:1, that of
the fifth in 3:2, that of the fourth in 4:3, and that of the whole tone
in 9:8.
Followers of Pythagoras applied these ratios to lengths of a string
on an instrument called a canon, or monochord, and thereby were able
to determine mathematically the intonation of an entire musical system.
The Pythagoreans saw these ratios as governing forces in the cosmos as well
as in sounds, and Plato's Timaeus describes the soul of the world as
structured according to these same musical ratios.