Approaches to Ancient Music

All lectures are free to attend.

We are excited to announce the inaugural seminar series of Ancient Music at Oxford, Approaches to Ancient Greek Music. This seminar explores the reconstruction and reimagination of ancient Greek music and brings together different approaches to this topic that have been traditionally separated by disciplinary boundaries. This seminar aims to increase the accessibility of a highly specialised subject, and draws on a multidisciplinary and international range of expertise. Please direct any questions to thyra-lilja.altunin@bnc.ox.ac.uk or cara.nicol@jesus.ox.ac.uk

Week 1 | 21 January

An Introduction to Ancient Greek Music

Armand D’Angour (Jesus College)
Should we try to hear Ancient Greek music?

Recent developments in ancient musical studies have indicated that it may be possible to produce realisations of Ancient Greek music that might approximate to how it sounded. Critics suggest that such attempts are doomed to failure, since too little can be accurately derived from metrical and melodic indications to give any sense of the sounds that would have been heard - our aural expectations are different, and such features as tempo, timbre, tuning, and dynamics must all be speculative. Should ancient music therefore be a subject only of academic study, with no attempt to hear how it might have sounded? What might we learn from the attempts to realise the sounds in practice?

Week 2 | 28 January

Approaches to Melodic Patterns Preserved in Pitch Accents

Thyra-Lilja Altunin (Brasenose College)
“Sing, Oh Muse”: On the Path of Reconstructing the Melodic Patterns of Ancient Greek Poetic Songs 

Ancient Greek poetry was sung, and both melody and rhythm were essential elements for the perception of these poetic songs by ancient audiences. Only limited fragments have been preserved with ancient melodies, and most poems have been transmitted without melodies. This paper focuses on accessing elements of poetic melodies from the accentuated texts of the poems. Phonological research has demonstrated a strong connection between the musical melody and the "word melody" in pitch-accented languages. In musical traditions of such languages, the melody often mirrors the pitch accent of the words, ensuring that the meaning and grammatical function of the words are preserved. This relationship has been observed in ancient Greek musical fragments between the musical melody and the accent movement of the Greek words, and this connection between melody and pitch accent offers a unique avenue for accessing elements of the melodic elements of ancient Greek prosody. 

This paper presents a methodological framework for recovering these melodic patterns from accented Greek texts. Central to this analysis is the concept of "melodic contour," a tool used in both ethnomusicology and phonology. Unlike general pitch progressions (which contain both absolute pitch and movement), melodic contour tracks only the direction of pitch movement, without considering absolute pitch values. The rules of correlation that have been developed based on the relationship observed between musical melody and accent movement in ancient Greek musical fragments allow for the generation of the melodic contours of the Greek words. This paper shows how an analysis of these melodic contours of Greek speech can reveal elements of the relationship of the sound of the poetry and the metrical, syntactic, and semantic structures of the texts. Furthermore, the melodic contour produced from the pitch accent movements can be the basis for a reconstruction/reimagining of the music of poetic songs. 

Anna Conser (University of Cincinnati)
A Deadly Marriage Hymn: The Musical Design of Medea Stasimon 4

My talk will begin with an overview of my approach to the musical analysis of lyric pitch accents.  This includes my large-scale digital analysis of accent patterns in the lyrics of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  In the second part of the talk, I will apply this method to the Fourth Stasimon of Euripides’ Medea, in which the chorus imagines the princess receiving Medea’s deadly wedding gifts.  As I will demonstrate, the first strophe-antistrophe pair displays a remarkably high degree of accentual correspondence, tracing the same accentual melody throughout both sets of lyrics.  Based on this overall correspondence, as well as the specific melodic contours traced by the responding accents, I argue that music would have played a critical role in framing the chorus’ lyrics at this dramatic turning point in the narrative.

Week 3 | 4 February

Music on the Ancient Stage

Maggie Tighe
The New Music of Euripides’ Hypsipyle 

Ancient Greek tragedy was saturated in song, resembling our modern operas or musicals more closely than what we would call a play. Unfortunately, time has forced these tragedies to become an almost entirely literary experience. The songs and music contained in Euripides’ tragedies shine light on an innovative compositional style that emerged in the 5th century called New Music. The New Musicians were primarily lyric poets but Euripides has been well established as actively participating in this novel movement. 

The Hypsipyle of Euripides is the best preserved of all his fragmentary tragedies and was a highly innovative play that made a significant cultural impact. Staged in approx. 410 BCE, it is associated with Euripides’ renowned interactions with the New Music tradition and its music has most significantly coloured its reception, from its first performance to the modern day. Despite its popularity in antiquity, Hypsipyle unfortunately has not survived in full. This paper will consist of an analysis of the New Musical elements that can be found in the opening songs of this tragedy.

Christopher Colby
Rhythm and Metre in Homer

How is measurement classified in epic? This paper presents a brief overview of the historiographic canonization of “the Dactylic Hexameter.” Then, it evaluates the effective dating of this term and visits archaic instances of μέτρον as a word connoting motherhood, quality, and the universal in the early archaic period, with an emphasis on Homer. Reflections are offered on contemporary uses of ῥυθμός and μέτρον in Greek lyric, and the consequences these pose for our conception and codification of colometry.

Week 4 | 11 February

Ancient Musical Philosophy: Plato to Boethius

Belle Rockett (New College)
Some Melody Previously Heard: The Song of Philosophy in Boethius’ Consolatio

Since antiquity, scholarly tradition has agreed that Boethius wrote about music only once. The work in question is his De Institutione Musica, an entirely unoriginal treatise constructed from free translations of earlier Greek material. In 2018, at the premiere of Professor Sam Barrett’s Songs of Consolation, we were invited to reconsider this idea. Through his reconstructions of medieval neumes, Barrett reintroduced us to the musicality of the Consolatio. The work symbolised a trend in Boethian scholarship, which prioritised the rhythm, sound, and content of its long-neglected poetry. However, the Consolatio Philosophiae, a text long studied for its philosophical arguments but rarely for its musicality, reveals a deeper engagement with music’s ethical and metaphysical capacities. This paper explores how Philosophia employs music as a therapeutic force, healing the Prisoner’s disordered soul and restoring its lost harmony. Drawing on Boethius’ own tripartite classification of music (musica mundana, humana, and instrumentalis), I demonstrate that the Consolatio enacts a philosophical exposition of the power of music to realign the soul with cosmic order. Through an analysis of poetic rhythm, melodic imagery, and the interplay between verse and prose, I demonstrate that Boethius presents music not merely as an aesthetic or mnemonic device, but as an instrument of moral and metaphysical restoration – one that reattunes the soul to its proper harmony and re-establishes the conditions for true philosophical understanding.

Andrew Hicks (Cornell University)
Sound Signifying in Boethius' De institutione musica

The appearance of a Greek notational system in Boethius's De institutione musica (at 4.3) is puzzling. The (idiosyncratic) system of notulae transmitted by Boethius is closely associated with an Aristoxenian tradition of theorizing, but he uses it in the service of a core project in Pythagorean music theory: a ratio-based division of the monochord (4.5). Boethius' notation has not garnered much attention in recent years, but in the early 1990s Blair Sullivan sought to harmonize these disparate theoretical traditions by arguing that the De institutione musica offers a "Platonic" model of musical signification, albeit a model indebted to Aristotle's theory of linguistic signification famously articulated in the Peri hermeneias, the very text translated into Latin and commented on by Boethius a few short years after the completion of his early quadrivial works. Boethius' musical semantics, Sullivan argues, is "dependent in every way on the properties of Platonic harmonic theory," and the diminutive notulae ultimately signify "the principles of harmonic theory that permeate and govern the universe"  (Sullivan 1993: 86-87). I argue against this view. If Aristotelian semantics is at play (a debatable proposition), Boethius' notulae signify a uox that is (here) equivalent to a res, a knowable thing existing in the world -- a (possible) sound and not a universal principle of harmonic theory.

Week 5 | 18 February

The Oxyrhynchus Musical Papyri and their Context

Amin Benaissa (Christ Church College)
Musical and Performance Culture in Oxyrhynchus

The city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt has yielded the largest number of papyri with musical notation, 14 fragments in total, all of them dating from the second or third century CE. These papyri, understandably enough, are mostly studied in isolation for the sake of their contents and technical aspects. It is worthwhile, however, to take a step back and consider the wider context in which they were copied and possibly performed. This brief talk will survey the literary and musical performance culture of Oxyrhynchus in the Roman period to situate its musical papyri in a more concrete framework. 

Cara Nicol (Jesus College)
Melodic Pitch Accentual Conformity in the Oxyrhynchus Musical Papyri

This paper examines patterns in pitch accentual conformity in the fourteen surviving Oxyrhynchus musical papyri. While the surviving fragments offer a variety in time, genre, and composer, they were unified by not only the location in which they were found, but also by many musical and stylistic decisions that connect the fragments as a collection. When we consider the Oxyrhynchus papyri not as fourteen individual compositions but as a single musical unit, a distinct Oxyrhynchus musical style begins to emerge that sets them apart from other Roman era fragments.

In order to do this, my talk focuses on moving and melismatic accents within the musical fragments, as well as instances of nonconformity in direct connection with the text and its content. It explores the manifestation of the accent in motion from a holistic perspective that takes into account not only the phonology of the accent but also the textual and more importantly musical context in which each instance of nonconformity and melisma is situated. In pursuing some of the wider confusion about the accents, this paper seeks to provide a musical explanation for the foundations of pitch conformity it upholds and situates the Oxyrhynchus fragments within the wider framework of Roman pitch accentual conformity.

Week 6 | 25 February

Workshop

John Franklin (University of Vermont)
How to Read Ancient Greek Music Notation

Week 7 | 4 March

Composition and the Reception of Ancient Musical Traditions

Alex Silverman (Jesus College)
Mime, metre, music: interpreting and performing the dochmiacs of the Fragmentum Grenfellianum

I will present my new musical setting of a passage from the Fragmentum Grenfellianum, and discuss the process and implications of adapting such a text for musical performance. The form and content of the FG, make it a compelling source for such an endeavour. It is a dramatic miniature written for a single voice, in which a woman begs her lover to take her back. The verse is distinctive for its complex metre which has been the subject of lively debate among scholars - including more recently Bing (2002), Cunningham (2004), and Esposito (2005)  - who have offered varying interpretations of the poem's metrical scheme. Wilamowitz's (1896) assertion that the piece may be identified, by virtue of its metrical complexity, as the missing link between Euripides' later choral odes and Plautus' comic cantica is now refuted. Nonetheless, the metre, form, and subject matter are strongly suggestive of a dramatic song. 

The FG contains the only recorded incidence of dochmiac metra outside of tragedy, and one of the longest unbroken runs of dochmiac elements to be found in the entire corpus of ancient Greek literature. I propose that those dochmiacs, likely influenced by and certainly evocative of tragic song, have plenty to tell us: about the function and interaction of various dochmiac metra when they occur in such continuous runs; about the early reception of the music of the Athenian tragedians; and about the place of metre in a popular performance culture of which song was a key component. 

My approach is both philological and practical: analysis of the dochmiacs of the FG serves as a prelude to an account and performance of a new composition, designed explicitly to reflect the metre of the fragment. It is hoped that such a bi-disciplinary study will shed further light on this fascinating song and its distinctive rhythms, and serve as a test case for alternative ways of describing and presenting ancient metre and music.

Felipe Aguirre Quintero (Conservatorio Superior de Música de las Islas Baleares)
A Reconstruction of the Concept of ἑρμηνεία in Ancient Greek Music 

Although the notion of hermenéia in Ancient Greece is primarily associated with the field of literary criticism, it is possible to reconstruct the meaning this concept held in relation to music. Certain sources (notably Plato and Pseudo-Plutarch) highlight its importance in understanding the deeper implications of artistic creation and performance. This presentation, after examining the semantic characteristics of the term within its rhetorical and literary context, aims to address the essential aspects of musical ἑρμηνεία. In this sense the term is understood not only as the set of technical skills required for the practical mastery of a given instrument (such as the aulos or the kithára) but also as the artist’s capacity to act as a ‘mediator’ (ερμηνεύς) between the created work and the audience. This conception unveils a nuance still relevant—and perhaps more necessary than ever—in contemporary musical performance. It moves the performer’s activity away from the common idea of mímēsis as an aesthetic experience and positions it closer to the contemplative—and ultimately irrational—state characteristic of religious experience.

Week 8 | 11 March

Archaeomusicology and Performance on Ancient Instruments

Callum Armstrong 
TBD

Barnaby Brown (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland)
Rhythms of Tongue and Toe: Engaging with the conceptions of ancient grammarians and how this impacts aulos-led song-dance

Stefan Hagel (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
TBD

11-12 March

Workshop in Collaboration with Lotos Lab

Barnaby Brown
Make Your Own Classical Aulos

12 March

Recital

The seminar will conclude with a performance in which we showcase the musical results of our approaches to resuscitating elements of ancient music. In this recital we will exhibit a variety of types of music and a range of sounds which will include performances of surviving fragments, attempts at authentic reconstruction of the music, poetic musical text, and diverse new compositions and recompositions that take inspiration from the ancient musical traditions.

18:00 Free recital in Jesus College Chapel with performances by Callum Armstrong, Barnaby Brown, and Stefan Hagel.

NB Location: Jesus College Ship Street Centre Lecture Theatre. This is not at the main Jesus College site, but can be found here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/E7HLongcKmeFuD9t9.

The Week 8 lectures will be held in the Buchanan Tower Room and the recital in the Jesus College Chapel.

Both of these can be found by asking at the Jesus College Porters Lodge.

Also livestreamed on Zoom at:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87651717393?pwd=Sa5QvFEYbhRd57bhIyAfWvpzqP4bwo.1

Meeting ID: 876 5171 7393
Passcode: 038170