Ancient Greek Music in Performance: Symposion Wien 29. Sept.\-\-1. Okt. 2003 (review)

How was ancient Greek music performed, and what did it sound like? These questions have intrigued scholars for centuries, especially since the first publication of actual pieces with musical notation by Vincenzo Galilei in his Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (Florence, 1581). By the middle of the seventeenth century, additional pieces had begun to appear in print (at least some of which are forgeries), and performances based on hypothetical reconstructions were presented in various courtly and academic circles. Marcus Meibom, for example, editor of the famous Antiquae musicae auctores septem (Amsterdam 1652), organized a concert at Queen Christina's court in Stockholm devoted entirely to reconstructions of Greek music, and a few decades earlier, Giovanni Battista Doni described in letters addressed to his friend Marin Mersenne several instruments he had designed capable of playing the ancient tonoi. Thus arose a tradition of performance practice applied to an ever expanding corpus of actual music (as distinct from literary remains such as music theory proper and references to music in other literature), informed by a continuing interest in the instrumentarium of ancient Greece, a tradition that continues to the present day. Under the influence of the 'early music' movement, increasingly sophisticated attempts were made to create recordings and perform concerts of 'ancient Greek music'. Some of these pieces (for example, the Epitaph of Seikilos and the fragment from Euripides' Orestes) have become a part of 'the canon'-at least in the anglophone world-through their inclusion in most of the anthologies accompanying introductory histories of Western music. Other scholars have explored the inherent musicality of the spoken text (see e.g. Stephen G. Daitz's recordings of Homeric poetry) and continued the longstanding tradition of modern creative resettings of ancient texts based on our knowledge of scales, tonoi, metre, instruments, and so on (e.g. Peter Steadman and his New York Greek Drama Company).

Readers of the symposium volume under review would, however, gain no inkling of any of this tradition from the editorial preface or the contributions of the various authors, all of whom either cheerfully ignore or are blissfully unaware of most of the substantial amount of musicological and organological scholarship devoted over the past 400 years to issues bearing on the performance of ancient Greek music, not to mention all of the recordings ranging from Fritz Kuttner and J. Murray Barbour's reconstructions of various tunings and temperaments (Musurgia Records Theory Series A, nos. 1-3 (1955-8)), through Gregorio Paniagua's La Musique de la Grèce antique (Harmonia mundi HM 1015 (1978)), and on to Annie Bélis's De la pierre au son: Musiques de l'antiquité grecque (K617 069 (1996)), none of which is cited even in passing. Instead, the editors aver in their preface that 'what is extant of ancient compositions doubtlessly deserves to be presented to the-increasingly interested-public', adding that in the performance presented as part of the symposium, 'the audience had the unique opportunity to compare several widely differing approaches, ranging from unaccompanied enactment of the vocal line (as preserved in the sources) up to entirely new compositions, based on the rhythms of the ancient text and transmitted musical scales, and to recreations based on fragments of ancient melodies', as if none of these things had ever been done in the traditions of scholarship and earlier recordings.

Beyond this general limitation reflected throughout the collection, the articles exhibit considerable variety in scope and method, as expected in a symposium volume: the first half of the book is devoted to the first two articles, which offer extended, wide-ranging, technical treatments of complex issues pertaining to the lyre and the aulos; the other five articles, comprising a focused treatment of archaeological evidence (the third article) and four relatively brief general essays, occupy the second half of the book. A pocket in the back cover...