♫ Ancient Greek Music ♫ This is a sound that hasn't been heard for 2,000 years. This is Ancient Greek music as we think
it was actually sung around 400 BC. I'm an Associate Professor of Classics at Oxford University, and for the last five years I've been concentrating on reconstructing the sounds of Ancient Greek music. We're rehearsing in Jesus College Chapel for a
concert that we're going to be putting on later in the Ashmolean Museum. The singers in the choir are scholars of ancient music, and they're going to be accompanied by
replicas of original instruments that were used in Ancient Greece. What we call "Greek poetry" is mainly
words that were intended to be sung, very often with the accompaniment of instruments. So the Greek poetry of the ancient world -
this was all sung to music. People think the music is lost. I
don't believe it is, we have the rhythms, we have the instruments, and we have the melodies. Put that together and you have the music. [Reciting Greek lyrics] What we know most about are the rhythms,
because they're inscribed in the meter. The metrical systems of ancient Greece were very precise, and they were based on the language. The Greeks conventionally thought that the words of their language consists of either long or short syllables. So we might say that a long syllable followed by two short ones would sound like: "daa, da-da - daa, da-da." So you get a rhythm, such as the dactylic
hexameter: daa da-da, daa da-da, daa da-da, daa daa... And that is the rhythmical basis that we can use when we are reconstructing the sound of Homeric music. What we needed to do was to bring together the other elements which were the melodic sound of ancient song. And the source material for the melodies is about 60 very precious ancient documents which have been preserved on stone, such as the
Delphic Paean by Athenaios, which is one that we'll be singing in the concert. And that has what we might call 80 or 90
bars of music: melodic notation preserved
that allows us to recreate and sing that piece. ♫ Ancient Greek Music ♫ One of the most exciting things that
has happened over the past decade is the discovery and recreation of replicas
of instruments. So for example there's an aulos,
which is a double pipe, that is in the Louvre, which is in such good condition
that we can replicate it absolutely precisely and get wonderful pipers to play it. And that gives us an indication of the
sound of the instrument and the tuning. The other is the stringed instruments... The cithara is the concert version of the lyre. We have some wonderful ancient vase
depictions from which we have actually created replicas, and one of which will
be used by Stefan Hagel in the concert. And then it's a question of working out
how the instrument was played. So this is an aulos, or a double pipe, and it's made of deer bone,
and the reeds are made of Mediterranean cane - grows everywhere, like a weed. And it's a single tube, which you delicately scrape and heat up and squeeze and clamp. It's quite wide bore compared with later double pipes. The other instrument that we play from maybe two or three centuries later is made of wood, and has a narrower bore. This one is a powerful instrument for outdoors
accompanying 50 singers in the temple or in a dance. So the tones that it produces - It's fascinating, they clearly didn't want a
great big range, because as you can see they're similar length and they
basically are one note apart. So you've got one going [sings scale]
and the other going [sings scale one note higher] And that means there's lots of overlap, and you can play games with the dissonance
between the two pipes that you wouldn't be able to do if they were offset. These instruments give us a range, you know - it's basically an F♯, a little bit below an F♯ at an octave... And that is - it lies beautifully with the other ancient evidence, so it really supports the reconstructions of the notations. So yes when I accompany the
Oresteias' chorus with this, we're able to play it at the same pitch it was written! It took a long time to figure out how to do that because the two lowest notes
aren't available on a single pipe, so by switching the F♯ and the G between
the two pipes I can actually play the melody. So there we are, I'm sharing [sings]
I can pay the bottom note here - - and I can pay the next note... there! But I don't have
both of those notes on both pipes... so it's got to be shared. - One of the most important things I tried
to convey in my conducting has been to channel and express the contrasting
moods and contrasting emotional implications of what they are singing,
which is very exciting because tonight we have a big performance coming up in
the Asmolean Museum, where we'll have not just academic colleagues who are very knowledgeable about what we are actually singing, but also BBC Radio 3, who are going to record our performance for the early music show. - Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this unique event. Essentially, we classicists study poetry, and all this poetry was composed with music. When Homer was composing The Iliad and The Odyssey he composed with a four-stringed lyre. One can reconstruct notes which we think were probably the basis of Homeric music. This is the earliest music that we think we can reconstruct - the music of Homer from around 700 BC - and Stefan Hagel is taking the notes that are
the basis of ancient Homeric music and improvising based on the Homeric texts. What Stefan has reproduced is a simple
and fairly repetitive melody. You could hear the underlying metrical rhythmical dactyls, the: da, da-da da, da-da da... And you hear the melody, and at the end of each line, a kind of instrumental flourish just on the strings of the cithara. The second piper is Callum Armstrong, who is an expert on the aulos, and is going to demonstrate an improvisation on the instrument. We have some sense of the notated music
that an aulos would have played, but essentially, an expert Piper like Callum needs to try and produce whatever sounds he can on the instruments that we have, and so here he's improvising and showing the kind of
sounds that the two pipes together can make. So you'll notice that the techniques that are used by the pipers is circular breathing, where they're breathing in
normally through their nose, they're holding the breath in their cheeks and
they're pushing it out, and at the same time they are taking breaths in through their
nose so that they can make a continuous sound, a bit like bagpipes, but doing it
with their own bodies. The most exciting development in reconstructing
ancient music is reconstructing the melody. We do have documents with melodic notation, notation that was devised around the fifth century BC, including this wonderful stone from Delphi, which has a paean, which is a
hymn of praise in honor of Apollo, and on the stone we have the words of
the text that was sung, and above the text we have these little symbols, which is the vocal notation, which tells us the precise melodic notes to which those words were sung. Now there are some gaps and I have filled in those gaps using only the notes that are available to us
from the rest of the state. So the final piece is a chorus from Euripides' "Orestes," in which the young Orestes is being chased by the Furies of
his mother, these spirits of vengeance. This is perhaps the most exciting piece
of music that survives from antiquity. It's on a papyrus about two inches
square, there's Greek writing on it, which is the text of Euripides' Orestes - a
chorus from that a few lines of it. Above that writing there are these symbols,
which are the melodic notes to which that text was set. So the finale of this performance is the reconstructed version of the chorus from Euripides' Orestes.