Music accompanied nearly all aspects of Ancient Greek life: religion, funerals, the harvest, military marches & of course poetry! Today’s #MuseumsUnlocked #thread highlights archaeological evidence for Greek #music & an excellent regional museum!
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#archaeology #greece #art
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#archaeology #greece #art
The study of Ancient Greek music is a large field on its own, with scholars focusing on everything from musical theory to notation and everything in between!
Songs are preserved in texts and inscriptions like these from Sounion, Vrasna, & Volos, each with its own notation style!
Songs are preserved in texts and inscriptions like these from Sounion, Vrasna, & Volos, each with its own notation style!
What were the instruments of Ancient Greek music? There’s an excellent exhibition of artifacts and reconstructions at the Archaeological Museum of Arta in Western Greece, which give us the opportunity to see what the most common instruments looked like. Let’s do a quick review!
The aulos was a set of double reed pipes, commonly associated with religious rituals—especially Dionysus—on Greek pottery (just look at those cheeks!). Reconstructions generally produce clarinet-like tones and the reeds were affixed to the heads of musicians by a leather strap!
The aulos is often shown accompanied by the tympanum. This cylindrical percussion instrument is similar to a hand drum or tambourine and was played wither either a drumstick or the musician’s palm.
The salpinx was a long straight bronze trumpet. Most depictions of the instrument are in the hands of a hoplite, and it is thought to be the major instrument for armies on the move.
Keeping things in the wind family: pan pipes bring us to the more bucolic genre of Ancient Greek music. Known as the syrinx, it can often be found in depictions of the god Pan or in the hands of a shepherd tending his flock!
The lyre was the Greek string instrument par excellence! Made from a tortoise shell, the lyre was a key part of Greek lyric poetry: often forgotten since the verses themselves are preserved without music! Associated with Apollo, it’s a common feature in Greek art, coins, & more!
Over time, components of the lyre were developed into a series of other instruments, each of which is associated with its own genre of Greek music! The barbitos & kithara build on the lyre differently, with the former simplifying play and the latter becoming more complicated!
Greece was also under constant influence from the musical traditions of its neighbors, and the popularity of the sistrum in art and religious iconography is a great example! Associated with the introduction of Isis into Roman Greece, the sistrum is found throughout Egyptian art!
Occasionally, archaeologists turn up evidence of lesser-known musical instruments from the Greco-Roman world. These scraps of bronze were excavated at the Macedonian site of Dion in 1992, and are our best evidence for an ancient water organ!
I’ll leave the rest to the experts, but don’t think that any of this was the work of Classical Greece! Evidence for music in the Aegean is found at Early Bronze Age sites in the Cyclades, as attested by these famous marble sculptures of musicians from Keros! Check out that aulos!
