As historians are recently discovering, Music played a fundamental role in the ancient world. For the ancient Greeks, it was a key part of both culture and everyday life, acting as a backdrop to religious festivals, marriages and funerals, to name a few. In fact, most Greek men were trained in one of the three main instruments of the time: the lyre, the kithara (both stinged instruments) and the aulos (a double reed instrument) whilst also being competent choral singers. However, there is very little remaining evidence of what this music sounded like, causing it to have been deemed a “lost art” by historians and music-lovers alike. Despite this, there have been several attempts to discover what has been lost, which reveal a connection between the Classical era and modern times.
Many aspects of modern Western music have been derived from early Greek practices: the concepts of scales, pitch, musical notation and terminology all affect the way in which music is composed and performed to this day. The most common system during the time period was the tetrachord – a scale of four notes that contained jumps in pitch. This later evolved into liturgical music (aka. Church music) that was a common feature of Medieval worship and traces of it can still be found in church services today. Moreover, the ancient Greeks have been credited with the theory of ethos, which describes the emotions that are a response to music stimuli. It is believed that musicians in the classical era would assign moods/sentiments to particular pitch ranges in their compositions, helping to characterise the type of melody most appropriate for varying social settings. It is these such practices that were instrumental in defining the basic structure and style of music over the centuries, providing a foundation for modern musicians to stand on.
Ancient Greek music is also said to have influenced a period relatively close to its origins: the Roman Empire. Originally, the Romans did not share the Greek’s high regard for music, discouraging the pursual of it as a career path. Music was not something that was factored into the general Roman school curriculum, resulting in very few people being skilled at an instrument. This all began to change, because of Greek cultural influence, in the Imperial period [27 B.C – 476 A.D], where the Roman Empire underwent a variety of political, social and cultural changes as it expanded its territory. Music became more respected and sought after in professional contexts, with the range of instruments mirroring those around a thousand years before. For although ancient music transitioned between the Greek and Roman Empires, the basic principles of it remained untouched.
It is evident that music has transformed over the centuries to become what it is today. Subtle traces of pitch, tone and harmony, derived from the ancient world, can be found in the concepts and notation that we associate with music today. What is particularly interesting is the perhaps more direct role that these ideas had on the Roman Empire around a thousand years later, altering people’s perception of music as a profession. For, although music has varied immensely over the years, the basic principles have, and arguably will, remained unchanged.
~Eleanor
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