How did ancient Greek music sound?

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. 

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". 

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. 

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."

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Captain Collette: The life of a woman on the front line

Capt Ashley Collette was the only woman in her platoon of soldiers on the Afghan front line - and she was in charge. In the Canadian armed forces, unusually, every job is open to women - and both sexes live together and fight together. 

On the first day that Capt Ashley Collette and her platoon of 60 men were deployed in the remote town of Nakhonay, near Kandahar, they came under attack. 

"I don't think that the enemy liked our presence," she says with a soldier's understatement. "It's kind of in the middle of where they want to be."

That first day set the pattern for the next few months. Twice a day, Six Platoon - part of Bravo Company in the First Royal Canadian Regiment - endured enemy fire, both on patrol and directly on the camp. It was so regular that the soldiers nicknamed it "contact o'clock". 

But Collette says being shot at made a sort of sense to her troops - they could see the bullets lighting up the sky and mountains as they came towards them. It was the IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and - towards the end of their rotation - suicide bombs, that wore on their nerves. 

On 21 June, Sgt Jimmy MacNeil, an engineer attached to the platoon, was killed by a bomb while on a foot patrol.

 He was a kind, popular soldier, and a close friend of Collette's. The hours following his death were frantically busy and it wasn't till later in the day that she got a chance to reflect. Then she went and sat by herself on a sandbank in the camp.

"We still had six months to go," she says. "I remember thinking 'How am I, one, going to hold it together myself, and two, going to hold together this group of 60 people who are devastated by this event?'"

Then, two of her men came and sat next to her, one on either side. Neither said anything - and she knew that she didn't need to say anything, that they understood how she felt.

Collette did hold it together. After returning from her tour, she was awarded the Medal of Military Valour, one of Canada's highest military honours, for her leadership in Afghanistan. (She is keen to attribute the accolade to the work of her whole platoon.)

Around 12% of soldiers serving in the Canadian Forces are women and they have been integrated into combat positions since 1989. 

The US and Brazil are currently in the process of working out the best way to place women in combat roles. The UK, which has not yet taken this step, will review its policy in the next five years.

Those who argue against putting women into combat sometimes say that a woman would not be able to carry a wounded fellow from the battlefield. Collette says she was tested every year in "soldier carry" and "soldier drag" exercises. Although she was paired with someone of a similar weight to herself, lifting bigger people using the "fireman's carry" is not as hard as you might think when you know how. 

A priority in any infantry unit is to develop team cohesion. The traditional way to do this is to train, eat and sleep as a unit. But when Canadian female soldiers were first placed on the front line, they were segregated from the men. 

It didn't work. Now they are mixed in together, and sleep in the same dorm.

The soldiers constructed a raised platform to give themselves more space

 

This does present some logistical challenges, but Collette took pains to be modest. While the men slept in boxer shorts, she would wear pyjamas.

 While training in Canada, she would climb into a cupboard to change, or pull her sleeping bag around her and change underneath. 

"Normally this would be a successful endeavour," she says wryly, before going on to describe a sleeping bag malfunction in which somehow the thing slipped from her grasp and she was left standing in electric blue knickers and bra. Someone shouted "Look at Ashley!" and all the men turned to laugh.

"I laugh with them because what can you do? I pull the sleeping bag up and change my clothes and everyone carries on, because you have way bigger things to worry about."

In Afghanistan, she shared a room roughly 3m x 4.5m (10ft by 15ft) with up to 10 people. But if anybody needed privacy they would just ask for it.

When you share a small space with a group of men for a length of time, they become like your brothers, she says. When men from other units came to her platoon and made the mistake of commenting on her appearance, her own soldiers cut them down.

"Soldiers from my platoon would look at those attachment soldiers and say, 'That's really irrelevant in this scenario. Keep your comments to yourself - that's our platoon commander.'"

Where do women fight?

• Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Sweden all permit women in all combat units
• France, Israel, and the Netherlands permit women in combat positions but they are barred from some units
• The US and Brazil are currently looking at how to include women in combat positions, and Australia is already phasing them in
• Many other countries including the UK send women to the front line in non-combat roles, or permit women to be fighter pilots

After her return from Afghanistan, some of her men approached her with a confession. 

"They said, 'In the beginning we were wary of you, but now we would follow you anywhere,'" she says. But then, she believes it's natural for soldiers to be wary of a new commander, regardless of the gender. "They always want to feel out your style of leadership."

She describes her own style as compassionate - "I believe in second chances" - and perhaps a little more democratic than some, prepared to listen even to the lowest ranks. But she quickly adds that she is authoritative when she needs to be.

A particular concern to her before her rotation was how she would be received by the Afghan village community - whether her sex would prevent her from establishing vital links with local leaders. 

"I thought that they wouldn't even listen to me, I thought that they would poke fun at me," she says. "But they didn't care at all." And this was in Panjwaii district, the Taliban's birthplace.

She was very popular with the village children, especially the girls, who would run after her with gifts of jewellery - but Collette says this was because she was kind, not because she was a woman. 

Although the village chiefs accepted the fact of Collette's gender, their wives were incredulous. After she had been in Nakhonay for about a month she was summoned to have tea with them and was quizzed about everything from what she liked best about Afghanistan to when she was going to settle down with a nice Muslim boy. 

The occasion was made even more surreal by the fact that her interpreter was not permitted in the room because he was male. Consequently, they were forced to make small talk at the top of their voices, so they could be heard through the walls.

Since her deployment, Collette has married and is currently taking a break from active service to complete an MA in social work. But she has every intention of returning to uniform, as a mental health specialist.

She is passionate that people see her as a soldier, rather than a "woman soldier" and describes the whole debate about whether women can handle a combat job as "null and void".

"In my experience," she says, "there's no reason why a band of brothers cannot be a band of brothers and sisters."

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DON'T EVER LET THEM IN

I am terrified of the dark. My grandmother, on the other hand, had an affinity for the dark. She loved and enjoyed the dark so much that most windows in her house were walled shut and the few that remained were, except for rare occasions like family visits, blacked out with several layers of black curtains.

It was only when I was about 16 that I realized that those two, her love and my fear of the dark, were connected.

When I was small I was, supposedly, very hyperactive. My mother never managed to control me and my father only did so on those rare occasions when he threatened me with punishments. But I loved my grandparents and, as my parents, said, I always behave right when my grandmother was around. Accordingly my parents dropped me many times at my grandmother’s place so that they themselves could have a calm weekend.

I was 8 years old when she died. At that time I was already scared of the dark – except, of course, when my grandparents were around.

Those eight years I stayed many times over. I remember vividly how I played with my grandfather and uncle Owen in the darkness. We had our special games, like a noise-based version of hide and seek which only worked when the house was particularly quiet and my grandfather taught me how to carve wood into spoons and flutes with just my sense of touch.

I remember it exactly – the way their faces were lightly visible in the dark but their eyes always penetrated through the thickest curtains of darkness. They were bright white, as if they were glowing from the sindise – with just a black pupil at the center.

My grandmother was always working around the house – cooking and baking for me, cleaning or tidying or preparing the beds for the night. The room always felt warmer when she was there and so, usually, i asked my grandfather and uncle Owen to play with me in the room that she was in.

Those weekends I never missed the light. Even my dreams were, often, just noises and smells and textures and shapes – never colors or visible objects. Still today I can navigate perfectly in the dark. And still today I can see very well in the dark and around my 16th year of life I concluded that my strong vision at night was the cause for my paralyzing fear of the dark.

The fear had been there as long as I remember and on most nights I slept with a nightlight. On those weekends with my grandmother the darkness had never been a problem. Cuddled up to her warm body I never felt fear and I never minded the figures that seemed to stand in the room, all around my bed.

They only came with the darkness. Never when there was a slight flicker of light, just with the absolute blackness of a night in a room without windows.

My grandmother called them the ‘Outcasts.’ She said that they were family and friends, former close ones, that wanted to return from the other side. She taught me again and again that I should never let them return.

I remember the way she said it. We were lying in the bed, my head cuddled up to the warmth of her shoulder. Somewhere behind me my grandfather was snoring and when I turned I could see his face glowing in the darkness, with his white skin it was even more visible than that of my grandmother.

“You can see the difference in their faces,” she said. “Their faces are darker. But if you really want to make sure then you have to look at their eyes. If their eyes are as black as their face or even darker then they are on the wrong side; they are dead and and they should stay that way no matter how much you miss them.”

“So they can’t come?”

“They can’t come unless you allow them to come.”

“What if I let them in?”

“Don’t ever let them in.”

Black on black, but I still saw them as clear as a pencil line pressed hard on a piece of paper, the type of pencil line that doesn’t just color the paper but rather pushes itself into the paper.

That night my grandmother fell asleep quickly but I, in the safety of her arms and with my grandfather behind me, watched the figures. They were gesturing and moving, voiced words and sometimes fought against one another; they pushed each other to the side and backwards, fighting for a spot on the borderline to life.

I saw their figures and I recognized their sizes and hairstyles, often I even thought I knew which clothes they were wearing. I never asked my grandmother about that, but for myself I concluded those were the ways they looked in the moment that they stepped from life to death.

With my grandmother I was safe. But without her the nights were terror. They came closer and they seemed more energetic, more violent, more likely to break through that barrier. Maybe they were closer because I was closer to letting them in, half out of fear and half out of curiosity.

The nightlight was my savior, but in those nights when my parents forgot to plug the light in there was no salvation. They stood above me with their dark figures pressed into the darkness and those eyes so dark that they seemed to extend deeper into space; as if they were hollow.

With 16 I tried to cure myself off my fear by “shock therapy.” I threw myself into one dark night after the other but rather than improve the situation got worse.

There was one figure particularly pushy. A smaller one with wild, curly hair and the darkest eyes of them all. I always knew who she was. She had only been there since I was 8.

The conclusions of my 16th year made too much sense to be overturned. I gave up my defense and accepted my fear and eternal dependence on nightlights. When I moved to university I even chose an apartment with a street lamp outside so that the light would certainly come through my window and keep the figures at bay.

With 23 I learned the truth about my fear.

I was at my mother’s place. We were at our second bottle of wine and a soothing melancholy, the type that you can see in a French actress’s eyes, had enriched the air. Somehow we came to speak about my grandmother.

“I miss her,” my mother said.

 

“Me too,” I said. “Sometimes I still dream of her cookies and when I wake up I can nearly taste the vanilla.”

“Oh,” she said. “Your grandfather loved those.”

“Did he? I don’t remember him eating any?”

My mother laughed.

“You were probably too young to remember that.”

“Not really. I remember playing with him.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Yeah. I played with him all the time.”

“Really, you remember that?”

“Of course.”

“Wow,” she said. “I’m really happy for that.”

“Me too.”

“I always thought you wouldn’t remember him because you were so young.”

I took a sip from my glass and let the bitterness fade from my mouth.

“I don’t remember going to his funeral.”

“Of course not,” she said. “We left you with a friend and went alone.”

“What? Why?”

“We thought you wouldn’t understand it. You were just 2 when your grandfather and uncle Owen had their accident.”

When I was 16 I thought I was scared of the figures standing at the borderline to our world.

Since I’m 23 I know that I’m not actually scared of those figures at the borderline. I’m scared and wondering how many others were allowed back inside.

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Top Tenner: Fergie fall-outs

Top Tenner picks out a selection of bust-ups involving Sir Alex Ferguson during his trophy-laden career.


10 - Peter Schmeichel

A lesser-known tale, but all that success, all that brilliant goalkeeping, the blonde Danish wall that occupied the United goal for so many years, none of it might have happened if a row between the pair had not been resolved. During a game at Anfield that United were winning 3-0 but ended up drawing 3-3, Ferguson blamed Schmeichel for the goals, the goalkeeper disagreed, and a row ensued.

"Obviously I stepped over the line," said Schmeichel. "The next day he [Ferguson] was in the office. I was called in and he said: 'Listen, I have to sack you. I can't tolerate my players speaking to me like that. It goes against my authority'." Schmeichel eventually apologised, and kept his job.

9 - Aberdeen players

You didn't have to be against Fergie to incur his wrath and devastating tongue. You didn't even have to be with him but disobedient. You didn't even have to be with him and lose. One of Ferguson's most memorable and excoriating pieces of criticism came while with Aberdeen in 1983, after they had just beaten Rangers in the Scottish Cup final.

The win in itself apparently wasn't good enough for Fergie, who was asked by a slightly baffled TV reporter for his reaction. Ferguson said: "We're the luckiest team in the world. It was a disgrace of a performance. (Willie) Miller and (Alex) McLeish won the cup for Aberdeen. Miller and McLeish played Rangers themselves. They were a disgrace of a performance. And I'm not caring, winning cups doesn't matter. Our standards have been set long ago and we're not going to accept that from any Aberdeen team. No way should we take any glory from that."

8 - Jaap Stam

You don't question Fergie. It mattered not how good you were, or how many trophies you'd won with him. You especially don't suggest that he tapped you up when he recruited you, which Stam did in his 2001 autobiography. Of course, Ferguson claimed the motivation for his subsequent sale to Lazio was that £16.5 million was too good an offer to turn down, and that he thought the Dutchman was finished, but he has since changed his mind on that one. Given Stam would go on to play another 150 games for Lazio, Milan and Ajax, it would have been a tricky assessment to stand by, but still...

7 - The media

Quite a large group to take on, but take them on he did. From refusing to talk to the BBC for years after objecting a documentary they made about his son, to banning one journalist over a book Ferguson hadn't read to casting out another for accurately reporting news of a Rio Ferdinand injury, the old boy's relationship with the media has been pretty, well, confrontational, at times. Actually, scratch that -- he was a bit of a git to them for about 20 years. Still, that didn't stop them greeting his retirement by giving him a cake shaped like a hairdryer.

6 - Brian Kidd

In his recent interview with Charlie Rose on American television, Ferguson offered an important piece of advice to would-be managers: "Never hold a grudge, that's very important." Many, not least his former assistant Brian Kidd, would presumably scoff at that. There was more than a little of the Mafia to Ferguson's methods, the sense that you were with him or against him, and if you fell into the latter category you might as well be dead, no matter how close you once were to him.

Kidd helped Ferguson build his first great team and was around as the second one was under construction as well, but decided to strike out on his own, leaving Ferguson's side to become Blackburn manager in 1998. This was seen as an abandonment, a betrayal of sorts, as Ferguson made clear in his first book, and when the ever-humourous hand of fate dictated that it was a draw against United that sent Blackburn down, Ferguson claimed not to be aware that his team had just demoted his former right-hand man. "Perhaps he feels the need to put on a front following his momentous decision to walk away from the success he enjoyed with us," he said after Kidd reacted to the game with some dignity. Ouch.

5 - David Beckham

There was more than a little of the stern but protective father and the bright but vaguely errant son relationship between Ferguson and Beckham. The father didn't really understand the son, but knew he had something special. The son respected the father, but wanted to do his own thing. Then came the hair, the clothes and the unsuitable girlfriend, and it all went a bit south. Of course most fathers don't welly a football boot into their son's forehead, but different people express their disappointment in different ways. "He got drawn into that celebrity status, you know?" Fergie told Charlie Rose. "And for me, I'm a football man. He lost the focus."

4 - Kenny Dalglish

One of the many, many complaints Liverpool fans had about Roy Hodgson was that he was too pally with Ferguson. It's hard to imagine a man as affable as Uncle Roy not being pally with anyone, but that he spoke with deference and affection towards the United manager was a source of much ire. That of course changed when Kenny Dalglish returned to replace Hodgson, an age-old feud rekindled, and the Kop were much happier for it.

Glaswegians of a similar age, Ferguson would often give a young Dalglish lifts around town when they were playing for Rangers and Celtic respectively, but when Ferguson arrived in Manchester, intent on knocking Liverpool "off their f****** perch", the old friendship withered. "You'll get more sense out of her," said Dalglish when asked about his old foe. The 'her' in question was his six-week-old daughter. Of course, it wasn't total hatred, and a mutual respect remained, so much so that Ferguson wrote the foreword to Dalglish's autobiography.

3 - Arsene Wenger

"They say he's an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I've got a 15-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages!" That was one of many, shall we say 'caustic' comments directed at Wenger when his Arsenal were a genuine domestic threat to United. In more recent times, when their title challenge had usually disappeared by February, Ferguson would speak in warmer tones about Wenger, a sign for most that he was no longer threatened, and that newer foes needed cutting down with a well-chosen jibe. 

2 - Rafa Benitez

Many arguments in football have more than a dash of pantomime to them. Passions rise in the moment, you call the other guy something horrible, he calls you something horrible back, you have a drink after the game and say sorry, all over. More often than not, it's the desire to win, combined with pressure and tribalism. Feelings tend not to run too deep. However, these two really didn't like each other -- the antipathy was genuine, and not just for theatre.

Ferguson constantly goaded Benitez, including accusing him of 'disrespecting' Sam Allardyce when all the Liverpool manager had done was vaguely wave his arms a bit. He of course succeeded in winding his rival up so that he eventually exploded in a flurry of paper and 'facts', although it's well to remember that Liverpool only actually lost one league game after this 'rant' (though they did fail to win for three league matches), so how much tangible impact it had on the 2008-09 title race is open to question.

1 - John Magnier

For United fans, this is probably the most significant, because it ultimately led to the arrival of the Glazers. It started, as many things do, with friendship. "Nobody could wish for better friends than them," said Ferguson of Magnier, a hugely successful Irish horse owner, and his wife, with whom he was listed as 'joint owners' of Rock of Gibralter. When the horse was retired to stud, Ferguson felt he was entitled to half of the earnings from the offspring, which could have totalled €50-70 million, whereas Magnier saw Ferguson's stake as more of an honorary thing, and not worth nearly that much.

All of this wouldn't have had much impact on United had Magnier and his business partner JP McManus not been steadily building up their stake in the club, so when the dispute over the horse reached the courts, the investors started asking some pointed questions about how Ferguson was conducting business, in particular in reference to his agent son, Jason. The dispute was eventually settled, but Magnier and McManus had one last card to play, and that was to sell their shares, with Malcolm Glazer only too happy to take them off their hands for an estimated £230 million. All leveraged against the club, naturally. 

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