
How did ancient Greek music sound? - sebkomianos
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24611454
======
corin_
> _But isn 't the music lost beyond recovery? The answer is no. The rhythms -
> perhaps the most important aspect of music - are preserved in the words
> themselves, in the patterns of long and short syllables._

This sounds a little bit like bollocks to me. The way we would speak lyrics of
more modern music, from Bach to Bieber, rarely matches up with how they are
set to music.

Given the article is written by the man behind this work, I'm not too sure
whether that's a gross over-simplification for the BBC audience, or if it's
simply the best they're able to do. Or perhaps some other research suggests
that in those times singing really was identical to speaking with the
exception of pitch/timbre etc. and rhythm didn't alter at all?

edit: Does seem like it was just an over-simplification, some great additional
thoughts in replies to me

~~~
asolove
In English, you can change the relative lengths of syllables in a word and
it's still the same word. In Greek this isn't the case: the relative lengths
of the vowels is part of what defines the word.

Maybe you don't believe me, since syllable lengths are so fungible in English.
But it really does sound wrong in classical Greek. A good way to get a feel
for this is to imagine saying English words while putting the emPHAsis on the
wrong syllaBLE. Sometimes it's just a bit weird, sometimes it's totally wrong,
and sometimes it actually turns into a different word. You wouldn't write a
poem and try to fit the meter by asking readers to change which syllable in a
word is emphasized. (Or at least, you would do so only rarely and for a
specific reason.)

Now, in Greek, instead of emphasis, the relative length of vowels in syllables
is prescribed and certain words are distinguished on this basis. In fact,
whereas meter in English poetry is based on emphasized syllables, meter in
classical Greek poetry is based on syllable length. So there is reason to
think it wouldn't change just to fit a song melody. This is also why, though
you can read Homer in English that is metrical, you can't get a feel for
heroic verse without hearing it in the Greek.

Let me give an indirect example that shows why this kind of reasoning doesn't
work across languages. In English, we often indicate sarcasm, emphasis, or a
question by intonation. A heavy, slow word might be more important, or a word
that is pronounced with the tone rising might indicate a question or
uncertainty. This is because "a word" in English is the same word regardless
of the tone with which it is said. But in Chinese, the "same" sound with
different tones actually is a different word. So in Chinese, you can't
indicate a question with tone, because that would actually make a different
word. Instead, you have to move words around, so that to indicate a word is
the highlight of a sentence you move it to the beginning, or to indicate which
word you aren't certain about you move it to the end.

Human language is fascinating!

~~~
corin_
Thanks for going into that - so in (ancient) Greek, were there words which
were the same as each other but for syllable length? Your mention of syllable
length being the basis of meter in poetry makes sense, but this is often the
case in English too, while English music allows us poetic license to tweak
away from the norm.

I also think you're slightly wrong (or at least exaggerated) in saying that in
English _" you can't change which syllable is emphasized more than very rarely
or it sounds like nonsense"_. If you take a piece of music and then alter this
then sure, but actually the emphasis will often be slightly different to how
it would be spoken. I wanted to double check on this belief, and thought about
it while listening to Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" (which was already
playing) and Stanford's Magnificat in G to add a different genre, in both
cases the emphasis is often on different syllables to how we would speak it if
we just saw the text without knowing the music.

Anyway, thanks again for the reply, I guess it falls (at least to an extent)
into the "simplified for the BBC audience", which is much preferable to the
alternative of "it's bullshit". :)

edit: Here's the Stanford piece (with music+lyrics if you're not familiar with
the text already):
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7UorDdRg60](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7UorDdRg60)
Was just a random picking off the top of my head (added bonus that it's, in my
opinion, one of the most beautiful things ever written)

~~~
thaumasiotes
> so in (ancient) Greek, were there words which were the same as each other
> but for syllable length?

Yes, of course. I know very little classical greek, but here's an example from
Latin:

malum - adjective, "bad"

maalum - noun, "apple" (I've written the long 'a' as two 'a's, which is not
normal practice).

Contrastive vowel length is a very normal language feature; consider modern
Japanese.

> I wanted to double check on this belief, and thought about it while
> listening to Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" (which was already playing)
> and Stanford's Magnificat in G to add a different genre, in both cases the
> emphasis is often on different syllables to how we would speak it if we just
> saw the text without knowing the music.

Modern songs and (especially) poetry vary in quality in how well the natural
rhythm of their language fits the rhythm they're set to (there's no particular
reason to believe that this only occurs in the modern day). It's definitely
true that there's a lot of material that doesn't do that well, but I
personally find that sort of thing jarring, and ovrwhelmingly the rhythm of
the language and the rhythm of the piece are compatible. Given a large enough
corpus, it's quite possible to figure out what rhythm(s) a word really wants
to have.

Finally, remember how I said that marking vowel length in writing was not
normal practice at the time? You might be interested to know that we know the
vowel lengths in Latin words _from_ their use in poetry.

Fun side note -- there's a famous Latin poet called Ovid; his name in Latin is
Ovidius (four syllables: O-vi-di-us). All of those vowels are short. The last
syllable is easily malleable, as it's a case ending, but the fact that the
three syllables before it are all short means that Ovid is always referred to
in poetry by a nickname, since Latin poetry essentially never allows for three
short syllables in a row.

~~~
thaumasiotes
another popular example from Latin:

occido (short i) - verb, "die"

occido (long i) - verb, "kill"

~~~
leoc
It doesn't seem different to, for example, 'hit' versus 'heat' in English.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Those are in fact the standard ways I was taught, in an English-speaking Latin
class, to pronounce short i ("hit") and long i ("heat"). But that isn't
necessarily historically accurate.

It's definitely worth noting here that the english words "hit" and "heat" are
felt by native speakers to use two different vowels (referred to as "vowel
quality"), whereas the Latin "occido" and "occido" were felt to use the same
vowel, in different lengths (referred to, oddly enough, as "vowel length").
That's why they're spelled the same.

Similarly, Japanese kana don't have different symbols for the short and long
versions of their various vowels. Long vowels use the symbol for a short
vowel, followed by a length mark.

English does use differing vowel lengths, but english vowel length is fully
determined by other things; it doesn't vary freely. A standard example would
be that the vowel in "made" is longer than the vowel in "mate".

~~~
mchaver
The "long" and "short" used in English classes (not Linguistics) usually
refers to the presence of a "silent e" and the lack of "silent e", but this
terminology does not necessarily match up to a phonetic long and short vowel.

I remember hearing an argument in a linguistics class that for English oral
stop consonants ("p","b","t","d","k" and "g" at the end of a syllable), the
primary source of differentiation between minimal pairs, like "made" and
"mate", is vowel length and that they are all devoiced.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Short_and_long_vow...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Short_and_long_vowels_in_English)

~~~
thaumasiotes
I'm aware of the English-class terminology, but interestingly enough the guy
bringing up "hit" and "heat" wasn't using that, as "heat" would be described
under that system as having a long E, not a long I.

It's definitely plausible to me that (when the word is pronounced in
isolation) word-final stop consonants are all devoiced. I haven't looked into
the question at all and don't plan to, so I'm basically just spitballing. But
my vocal tract can definitely start running down before I entirely finish
speaking.

However, a much bigger issue than distinguishing "hid" from "hit" is
distinguishing "hip" (where the final stop has become a glottal stop) from
"hit" (ditto). I was under the impression that in general there isn't
necessarily any phonetic difference at all there. If the argument you mention
was only referring to minimal pairs _with the same place of articulation_ ,
that sounds more reasonable.

~~~
mchaver
I think final glottalization is a definite possibility, but I don't think it
is a huge issue for native speakers given that context and word usage will
resolve it for the most part.

------
hetman
For anyone curious, here is a reconstruction of the Song of Seikilos mentioned
in the article:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk)

It is based on the musical notation found on a tombstone and is, I think, the
oldest complete Greek musical piece found to date.

~~~
rednukleus
That is beautiful. I'm really looking forward to hearing more reconstructed
ancient music.

------
lauremerlin
Annie Belis, brilliant researcher from France's most selective post doct was
already doing this with her ensemble Kerylos in 1990. The site is in French
though but the songs in Ancient Greek
[http://www.kerylos.fr/index.php](http://www.kerylos.fr/index.php) And here is
a chorus, easier for our ears I guess
[http://youtu.be/R_KmlIX3aHc](http://youtu.be/R_KmlIX3aHc)

------
Pxtl
I wish they'd expored more the issue of the pitch itself. There are cultures
on Earth that don't use the 12-semitone chromatic scale that is near-universal
today. There are Eastern cultures that historically bore very different
scales... to my ears it sounds unlistenable, but I'm always curious if that's
just a cultural thing. Do we know the origin of the chromatic scale?

~~~
mynameishere
Semitones fall so neatly into fractions that I can't imagine it's a matter of
culture. When microtones are used I suspect tone deafness or intentional
deviation/dissonance are the main actors.

~~~
hetman
I'm not sure if you can call the fractions of semi-tones of the equal tempered
scale (used in most modern Western music) as neat. Indeed, its widespread
introduction was very controversial because it was always considered a
compromise on the purity of the sound. Never the less, its incredible
convenience prevailed.

When we talk about "pure" sounds. The sound intervals that sound best to the
human ear form simple numeric frequency ratios. However, if you tune a scale
in a way that is closer to this ideal, not every semi-tone is interchangeable
and playing pieces in certain keys sounds down right horrible.

That's why, choosing the key of a piece, once actually had a relatively larger
impact on how it would sound, depending on how the instrument was tuned.
Dissonance in some keys was even sometimes exploited by certain composers.
Unfortunately we lose the impact of how these pieces would have sounded when
played on modern instruments. We're talking here about pieces from composes as
recent as Chopin.

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davideous
This reminds me of something my Latin teacher used to say: We don't know how
Latin was actually pronounced because all of the audio tapes were destroyed
when Rome burned down. :-)

------
christudor
Here's my take on this: either the author or the BBC has simplified what is
really going on, because we actually know a lot more about Ancient Greek Music
than this article suggests.

Most importantly (I think), ancient music is not (only) preserved in the words
themselves (i.e. by vowel length and things like that). There is also a lot of
evidence for musical notation, which has been preserved both in the papyrus
tradition (where we have lines of tragic verse with the actual notes
transcribed above - you can see an example here:
[http://classics.uc.edu/music/](http://classics.uc.edu/music/)), as well as
from discussions of ancient music by the ancients themselves, e.g. Plutarch's
'On Music'

------
beeco
Maybe they could do something like Fringe and get the noise from the walls.

