A thread for Ancient Music, please!!!

[Héctor]

Originally Posted by micrologus

Sumerian music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H8_13x3JaI

Beautiful!! Sounds like an indian song...

[Héctor]

C. Leonard Woolley with the plaster cast
of the Sumerian Queen's Lyre, 1929

In 1929, C. Leonard Woolley led an excavation that recovered four lyres and a harp from Ur in Ancient Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. They are the oldest existing string instruments, dating to about 2750 BCE.

The instrument shown below, is the restored Great Lyre of Ur. It was recovered from the grave site of King "Lugal" Abargi, dated about 2685 BCE. The grave was ceremonially guarded by six soldiers wearing copper helmets and carrying spears. A dozen men armed with their weapons laid close to the bodies of richly adorned women, supposedly singers and a harpist. Close to their heads the remnants of two musical instruments were found. They may be associated with the ceremonial burial of the king.

The restored instrument is on display at the University of Pennsylvania museum. The head of the bull is covered with gold leaf and the beard and eyes are fashioned from lapis lazuli. The lyre’s wooden structure has been reconstructed from the detailed measurement made by pouring the plaster into the impression left by the disintegrated wood, similar to the photo on the left of the plaster cast done by Woolley for the Queen's Lyre, now at the British Museum in London. The eleven strings fastened on the rectangular sound-box are modern. The front of the sound-box is decorated with the mosaic plaque, trapezoidal in shape and set in bitumen. In one of four scenes, depicting mythological creatures, a seated animal – onager or bear – plays a similar lyre. Flutes of Gilgamesh and Ancient Mesopotamia

The Great Lyre of Ur, University of Pennsylvania Museum

[myaskovsky2002]

I couldn't put a youtube video, even using the youtube icon (12th)...

How can I?

Martin

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by myaskovsky2002

I couldn't put a youtube video, even using the youtube icon (12th)...

How can I?

Martin

Have a look here: http://www.brightcecilia.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=4760 .

Sorry, it's ridiculously complicated to embed a Youtube on this software. But you can just C&P the url as I just did.

[Héctor]

[Héctor]

The legend that Terpander rejected "four voiced song" in favor of new songs on the seven-stringed lyre (fragment 4 Gostoli) epitomizes an encounter between two musical traditions during the Greek Orientalizing period (c. 750-650 B.C.), catalyzed by the westward expansion of the Assyrian empire. The seven-stringed lyre answers clearly to the heptatony which was widely practiced in the ancient Near East, as known from the diatonic tuning system documented in the cuneiform musical tablets. "Four voiced song" must be understood as describing the inherited melodic practice of the Greek epic singer. The syncretism of these two traditions may be deduced from the later Greek theorists and musicographers. Though diatonic scales were also known in Greece, even the late theorists remembered that pride of place was given to other forms of heptatony—the chromatic and enharmonic genera, tone structures which cannot be established solely through the resonant intervals of the diatonic method. Nevertheless, these tunings were consistently seen as modifications of the diatonic—which Aristoxenus believed to be the "oldest and most natural" of the genera—and were required to conform to minimum conditions of diatony. Thus the Greek tone structures represent the overlay of native musical inflections on a borrowed diatonic substrate, and the creation of a distinctly Hellenized form of heptatonic music. More specific points of contact are found in the string nomenclatures, which in both traditions are arranged to emphasize a central string. There is extensive Greek evidence relating this "epicentric" structure to musical function, with the middle string a sort of tonal center of constant pitch, while the other strings could change from tuning to tuning. So too in the Mesopotamian system the central string remained constant throughout the diatonic tuning cycle.

TERPANDER: The Invention of Music in the Orientalizing Period