BBC: Πώς ηχούσε η αρχαία ελληνική μουσική; (Απόσπασμα)
''How did ancient Greek music sound?''
Φωτογραφίες:ΚΩΤΣΙΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ ΧΡΗΣΤΟΣ
Τον ήχο της αρχαίας ελληνικής μουσικής επιχειρούν να ζωντανέψουν Βρετανοί ακαδημαϊκοί, σύμφωνα με το BBC. Μάλιστα μετά από επισταμένες έρευνες αλλά και την κατασκευή μουσικού οργάνου παρουσίασαν και ένα δείγμα αρχαίου ήχου.
«Συχνά ξεχνάμε ότι τα γραπτά κείμενα που αποτελούν τις ρίζες της δυτικής λογοτεχνίας, τα έπη του Ομήρου, τα ερωτικά ποιήματα της Σαπφούς, οι τραγωδίες του Σοφοκλή και του Ευριπίδη, αρχικά ήταν όλα μουσική. Χρονολογούνται περίπου από το 750-400 πΧκαι συνετέθησαν για να τραγουδηθούν εξ ολοκλήρου ή μερικώς, με την συνοδεία λύρας, πνευστών και κρουστών» αναφέρει στο BBC ο καθηγητής της Οξφόρδης, Αρμάν Ντ' Ανγκούρ.
Μουσικό απόσπασμα
Επιτάφιος ύμνος του 200π.Χ καλεί τον ακροατή να χαρεί τη ζωή πριν αυτή εξαφανιστεί
«Οι ρυθμοί – που είναι ίσως το πιο σημαντική πλευρά της μουσικής - διατηρούνται εντός των ίδιων των λέξεων, στις βραχείες και μακρές συλλαβές...Τα (αρχαία) όργανα μας είναι γνωστά από περιγραφές και απεικονίσεις... Τώρα νέες αποκαλύψεις για την μουσική των Αρχαίων Ελλήνων έχουν έχουν προκύψει από κείμενα του 450 πΧ περίπου που περιέχουν φωνητική σημειογραφία» υπογραμμίζει ο καθηγητής.
Ο Ντ’ Ανγκούρ εξέτασε το πως θα ηχούσαν στίχοι που είχαν γραφτεί σε επιγραφές από το 200 μ.Χ, ενώ ο δρ. Ντέιβιντ Κριζ του Πανεπιστημίου του Νιούκαστλ κατασκεύασε ένα όργανο οκτώ χορδών για να παίξει αυτές τις μελωδίες.
Εναλλακτικά το μουσικό απόσπασμα από το BBC
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ
How did ancient Greek music sound?
By Armand D'Angour
Greek theatre used music with the drama. But what did it sound like?
The music of ancient Greece, unheard
for thousands of years, is being brought back to life by Armand D'Angour, a
musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University. He describes what his
research is discovering.
"Suppose that 2,500 years from now all that survived of the Beatles songs
were a few of the lyrics, and all that remained of Mozart and Verdi's operas
were the words and not the music.
Imagine if we could then reconstruct the music, rediscover the instruments
that played them, and hear the words once again in their proper setting, how
exciting that would be.
This is about to happen with the classic texts of ancient Greece.
It is often forgotten that the writings at the root of Western literature -
the epics of Homer, the love-poems of Sappho, the tragedies of Sophocles and
Euripides - were all, originally, music.
Dating from around 750 to 400 BC, they were composed to be sung in whole or
part to the accompaniment of the lyre, reed-pipes, and percussion instruments.
Finding the pitch
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.
Time travellers: Academics are reconstructing the
lost sound of ancient Greece
The instruments are known from descriptions, paintings and archaeological
remains, which allow us to establish the timbres and range of pitches they
produced.
And now, new revelations about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few
dozen ancient documents inscribed with a vocal notation devised around 450 BC,
consisting of alphabetic letters and signs placed above the vowels of the Greek
words.
The Greeks had worked out the mathematical ratios of musical intervals - an
octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.
The notation gives an accurate indication of relative pitch: letter A at the
top of the scale, for instance, represents a musical note a fifth higher than N
halfway down the alphabet. Absolute pitch can be worked out from the vocal
ranges required to sing the surviving tunes.
While the documents, found on stone in Greece and papyrus in Egypt, have long
been known to classicists - some were published as early as 1581 - in recent
decades they have been augmented by new finds. Dating from around 300 BC to 300
AD, these fragments offer us a clearer view than ever before of the music of
ancient Greece.
The research project that I have embarked on, funded by the British Academy,
has the aim of bringing this music back to life.
Folk
music
But it is important to realise that ancient rhythmical and melodic norms were
different from our own.
Temple of Poseidon: The music might have sounded
unfamiliar to modern ears
We must set aside our Western preconceptions. A better parallel is
non-Western folk traditions, such as those of India and the Middle East.
Instrumental practices that derive from ancient Greek traditions still
survive in areas of Sardinia and Turkey, and give us an insight into the sounds
and techniques that created the experience of music in ancient times.
So what did Greek music sound like?
Some of the surviving melodies are immediately attractive to a modern ear.
One complete piece, inscribed on a marble column and dating from around 200 AD,
is a haunting short song of four lines composed by Seikilos. The words of the
song may be translated:
While you're alive, shine:
never let your mood decline.
We've a brief span of life to spend:
Time necessitates an end.
The notation is unequivocal. It marks a regular rhythmic beat, and indicates
a very important principle of ancient composition.
In ancient Greek the voice went up in pitch on certain syllables and fell on
others (the accents of ancient Greek indicate pitch, not stress). The contours
of the melody follow those pitches here, and fairly consistently in all the
documents.
Tuning up
But one shouldn't assume that the Greeks' idea of tuning was identical to
ours. Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD provides precise mathematical ratios for
numerous different scale-tunings, including one that he says sounds "foreign and
homespun".
Timeless: Joan Plowright and John Gielgud preparing a
1959 radio version of a Sophocles play
Dr David Creese of the University of Newcastle has constructed an
eight-string "canon" (a zither-like instrument) with movable bridges.
When he plays two versions of the Seikilos tune using Ptolemy's tunings, the
second immediately strikes us as exotic, more like Middle Eastern than Western
music.
The earliest musical document that survives preserves a few bars of sung
music from a play, Orestes by the fifth-century BC tragedian Euripides. It may
even be music Euripides himself wrote.
Music of this period used subtle intervals such as quarter-tones. We also
find that the melody doesn't conform to the word pitches at all.
Euripides was a notoriously avant-garde composer, and this indicates one of
the ways in which his music was heard to be wildly modern: it violated the
long-held norms of Greek folk singing by neglecting word-pitch.
We've a brief span of life to spend”
The epitaph of
Seikilos
However, we can recognise that Euripides adopted another
principle. The words "I lament" and "I beseech" are set to a falling,
mournful-sounding cadence; and when the singer says "my heart leaps wildly", the
melody leaps as well. This was ancient Greek soundtrack music.
And it was received with great excitement in the Greek world. The historian
Plutarch tells a moving story about the thousands of Athenian soldiers held
prisoner in roasting Syracusan quarries after a disastrous campaign in 413 BC.
Those few who were able to sing Euripides' latest songs were able to earn some
food and drink.
What about the greatest of ancient poet-singers, Homer himself?
Homer tells us that bards of his period sang to a four-stringed lyre, called
a "phorminx". Those strings will probably have been tuned to the four notes that
survived at the core of the later Greek scale systems.
Professor Martin West of Oxford has reconstructed the singing of Homer on
that basis. The result is a fairly monotonous tune, which probably explains why
the tradition of Homeric recitation without melody emerged from what was
originally a sung composition.
"What song the Sirens sang," is the first of the questions listed by the 17th
Century English writer, Sir Thomas Browne, as "puzzling, though not beyond all
conjecture".
"The reconstruction of ancient Greek music is bringing us a step closer to
answering the question."
ΠΗΓΗ
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-2461145422-10-2013