Music

Greek poetry was made to be heard, and much of it was sung. This section tells what is known of that music. It starts with the basic ideas of music theory, explained from the beginning. It then covers the Greeks’ own notation, their scales and rhythms, the instruments they played, where music was performed, and modern performances of the surviving scores.

Greek music was overwhelmingly song, and the instruments were there to support the voice.^[1] So everything in this section bears on the poems elsewhere on the site. This guide explains the words the menu uses, shows how the pages are arranged, and suggests an order.

Mousikē

The Greek word μουσική (mousikē) means “the art of the Muses”. It first appears in Pindar and Epicharmus.^[2] It covered more than our word music, and the Mousikē tab of the Overview explains how much more.

Sounds and intervals

An interval is the distance in pitch between two notes. The basic intervals were found as ratios of string lengths:^[3]

The fourth, the fifth and the octave were the concords, the intervals heard as sounding well together.^[4] The Music theory page lets you hear each of them on a sounding string.

Tetrachords and genera

Greek scales were built from tetrachords (τετράχορδον, tetrachordon, “four strings”): four notes spanning a fourth. The two outer notes were fixed. The two inner notes could move, and where they stood decided the genus (γένος, genos, “kind”) of the scale:^[5]

The Greek chromatic and enharmonic are not the modern ones.^[6] The diagram shows what the words meant then.

Harmonia and key

A harmonia (ἁρμονία, “tuning”, plural harmoniai) was a way of tuning the notes for a style of song. The word is often translated “mode”. The harmoniai differed in their choice of notes and in their range, and some carried rhythms and melodic habits too.^[7] Their names include Dorian, Phrygian and Lydian.

A key, in Greek τόνος (tonos, plural tonoi), is the same scale set at a higher or lower pitch. In later theory the keys took over the old names.^[8]

Notation and rhythm

From at least the fourth century BC there were two notations, two sets of signs for writing notes: one for the voice and one for instruments.^[9] The Notation page reads the Seikilos song sign by sign.

In rhythm, each measure had a thesis (θέσις, “placing”), the down-beat, and an arsis (ἄρσις, “lifting”), the up-beat.^[10] An ancient writer traced the two words to the dancer’s foot: lifted for the arsis, set down for the thesis.^[11]

Instruments

A lyre has two arms rising from a sound-box and joined by a crossbar, with strings of equal length.^[12] The kithara was the wooden concert lyre of professional singers. The lyra was the lyre made from a tortoise shell, played at home, at drinking-parties and at school.^[13]

The aulos was a reed pipe with finger-holes, almost always played in pairs.^[14] It is often called a “flute”, but wrongly: its sound came from a reed, like an oboe’s.^[15]

The pages

A suggested path

1. Overview: what survives, and the idea of mousikē.
2. Music theory: pitch, octave, tone and semitone, intervals, tetrachords. Press the strings and keys to hear each idea.
3. Instruments: the lyre family and the aulos.
4. Notation, then Scales: how the Greeks wrote and organised their notes.
5. Rhythm and Melody: how music went with the long and short syllables and with the pitch accent. Read Phonology › Accent and morae first if the accent is new to you.
6. Performance: the symposium, the chorus and the theatre.
7. Hearing it: modern performances of the surviving scores.

Notes

1. ^ West 1992, p. 39.
2. ^ West 1992, p. 225.
3. ^ West 1992, pp. 8–12.
4. ^ West 1992, p. 160.
5. ^ West 1992, pp. 160–162.
6. ^ West 1992, p. 3.
7. ^ West 1992, pp. 177–184.
8. ^ West 1992, pp. 184–189.
9. ^ West 1992, p. 7.
10. ^ West 1987, pp. 85, 90.
11. ^ Phillips 2018, pp. 76–77.
12. ^ West 1992, pp. 48–49.
13. ^ West 1992, pp. 50–51.
14. ^ West 1992, pp. 81–82.
15. ^ West 1992, pp. 1–2.