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The earliest known example of a complete notated musical composition (a song complete with lyrics) used a method of notation developed by the ancient Greeks. This piece of music is called the Seikilos Epitaph, it is carved on a tombstone in Turkey, and it most probably dates from the 1st century AD. The Byzantine Empire, which grew from the ...
- Musical Origins
- Musical Instruments
- Music Theory
- Musicians
- Music & Religion
- Music & Education
- Music For Pleasure
- Music in Art
For the ancient Greeks, music was viewed as quite literally a gift from the gods. The invention of specific instruments is attributed to particular deities: Hermes the lyre, Pan the syrinx (panpipes) and Athena the aulos (flute). In Greek mythology the Muses personified the various elements of music (in the wide Greek sense of the term) and were sa...
Greek musical instruments included stringed, wind, and percussion. By far the most popular were the lyre, aulos (usually double), and syrinx. Other instruments, however, included the rattle (sistrum and seistron), cymbals (kymbala), guitar (kithara), bagpipe (askaulos), conch and triton shells (kochlos), trumpet (salpinx), horn (keras), tambourine ...
There is evidence that the Greeks began to study music theory as early as the 6th century BCE. This consisted of harmonic, acoustic, scalar, and melody studies. The earliest surviving (but fragmentary) text on the subject is the Harmonic Elements by Aristoxenos, written in the 4th century BCE. Music also became an element of philosophical study, no...
Greek musicians were very often the composers and lyricists of the music they performed. Known as the 'makers of songs' or melopoioi, they created melos: a composition of words, tune, and rhythm. There is evidence that musicians enjoyed an elevated status in society as indicated by their particular robes and presence on royal household staff lists....
Music and dancing accompanied processions on special religious occasions in various Greek cities and, amongst the most famous in the Greek world, were the Panathenaia and Great Dionysia festivals of Athens. Certain religious practices were usually performed to music, for example, sacrifices and the pouring of libations. Hymns (parabomia) and prayer...
Plato informs us that the first schools dedicated to musical education were created by the Cretans. However, the heyday of music in the classroom was during the 6th and 5th centuries BCE when schools of music were established in Athens where pupils aged between 13 and 16 were taught to play the lyre and kithara and to sing, accompanied by their tea...
Music was a staple element of the symposium or all-male drinking party. After eating, the men each sang a song (skolia) with an aulos, lyre, or barbiton providing backing music. Often they sang amusing satirical songs (silloi). Finally, at the end of the evening, it was common for the group to take to the streets as a komos (band of revellers) and ...
Musicians and musical instruments were a popular subject on frescoes, in sculpture, and on Greek pottery, particularly in the geometric, black-figure and red-figure styles. Aside from all of the major figures of Greek Mythology previously mentioned, a notable addition to the subject of music on Greek pottery is the greatest of heroes Hercules. Late...
- Mark Cartwright
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Jul 13, 2021 · A central concern in ancient Greek philosophy of music is the connection between music’s capacity to imitate emotions and its social value. Plato (427/28–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) both develop an account of this relation, and are particularly interested in the pedagogical consequences of their theories.
20.9. 1950s: The First Synthesis Language. Max Mathews, working at the acoustics research department Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, conducted experiments in analog to digital conversion (ADC) and digital to analog conversion (DAC) 1957: Music I is used on an IBM 704 to render compositions by Newman Guttman.
Jun 20, 2017 · Music must first be defined and distinguished from speech, and from animal and bird cries. We discuss the stages of hominid anatomy that permit music to be perceived and created, with the likelihood of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens both being capable. The earlier hominid ability to emit sounds of variable pitch with some meaning shows that music at its simplest level must have ...
- Jeremy Montagu
- University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
- 2017
Feb 14, 2018 · Adler’s (2009) discussion in Nature of a 40,000-year-old bird-bone flute has the provocative title, “The earliest musical tradition”. But the search for the origins and expansion of music begins not at merely 40 Kya with the onset of European flutes (pipes) in the Upper Palaeolithic, discussed in the next section.
Feb 12, 2019 · Two assumptions were fundamental to much of the work of the founding figures of comparative musicology: 1. Cultures evolved from simple to complex, and as they do so they move from primitive to ...
