> <i>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.</i><p>This sounds a little bit like bollocks to me. The way we would speak lyrics of more modern music, from Bach to Bieber, rarely matches up with how they are set to music.<p>Given the article is written by the man behind this work, I'm not too sure whether that's a gross over-simplification for the BBC audience, or if it's simply the best they're able to do. Or perhaps some other research suggests that in those times singing really was identical to speaking with the exception of pitch/timbre etc. and rhythm didn't alter at all?<p>edit: Does seem like it was just an over-simplification, some great additional thoughts in replies to me
For anyone curious, here is a reconstruction of the Song of Seikilos mentioned in the article:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk</a><p>It is based on the musical notation found on a tombstone and is, I think, the oldest complete Greek musical piece found to date.
Annie Belis, brilliant researcher from France's most selective post doct was already doing this with her ensemble Kerylos in 1990. The site is in French though but the songs in Ancient Greek <a href="http://www.kerylos.fr/index.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.kerylos.fr/index.php</a>
And here is a chorus, easier for our ears I guess <a href="http://youtu.be/R_KmlIX3aHc" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/R_KmlIX3aHc</a>
I wish they'd expored more the issue of the pitch itself. There are cultures on Earth that don't use the 12-semitone chromatic scale that is near-universal today. There are Eastern cultures that historically bore very different scales... to my ears it sounds unlistenable, but I'm always curious if that's just a cultural thing. Do we know the origin of the chromatic scale?
This reminds me of something my Latin teacher used to say: We don't know how Latin was actually pronounced because all of the audio tapes were destroyed when Rome burned down. :-)
Here's my take on this: either the author or the BBC has simplified what is really going on, because we actually know a lot more about Ancient Greek Music than this article suggests.<p>Most importantly (I think), ancient music is not (only) preserved in the words themselves (i.e. by vowel length and things like that). There is also a lot of evidence for musical notation, which has been preserved both in the papyrus tradition (where we have lines of tragic verse with the actual notes transcribed above - you can see an example here: <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/music/" rel="nofollow">http://classics.uc.edu/music/</a>), as well as from discussions of ancient music by the ancients themselves, e.g. Plutarch's 'On Music'