Music in Ancient Greece:

• Epitaph of Seikilos
• First Hymn to Apollo, from the city of Delphi
• Second Hymn to Apollo, from Delphi
• Tchaikovsky, Romeo & Juliet Overture-Fantasy (what you might have expected Greek music to sound like?)
• An excellent book on Greek culture: "The Greek Way" by Edith Hamilton
• Chorus from Euripides's Orestes
• Re-creations of Roman Music
• The "Yaman" Raag from Indian Classical music
• "The Bacchae" by Euripides
• The "Bacchanale" from the opera Samson & Delilah by Camille Saint-Saens

George Washington: upright, tall and proud. Versus Snidely Whiplash: crooked, scheming, and suspicious.

Orpheus was the figure in Greek Mythology personifying the power of music. Orpheus especially embodied music's power of ethos--moral improvement by activation of virtue in the soul. In this painting from around 1900, by John Macallan Swan (1847-1910) depicts the most extreme form of Orpheus's power: his playing and singing was said to charm animals and even to make trees sensible to music. A poetic exageration, for sure--but the Greeks were extreme, stark, in their conceptions.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau's 1862 painting "The Remorse of Orestes" (or "Orestes Pursued by the Furies") depicts the torment Orestes felt after killing his mother Clytemnestra out of revenge--she had murdered his father Agamemnon.


The Vienna Papyrus G 2315, containing an excerpt from Euripides's Orestes, with musical notation.

The term "scale" derives from words meaning "bowl" or "shell."

       Hear the Diatonic Tetrachord            Hear the Chromatic Tetrachord           Hear the Enharmonic Tetrachord

   

The lyre was associated with Apollo, the sun god--it is he who plays the lyre in the image above. The auolos was associated with the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine. Hear samples of the aulos's sound here.

Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Dionysus from 1640 is perhaps a more accurate depiction than the Greeks could have conceived:



This video is part of a production of Euripides's play The Bacchae, about the cult of frenzied women worshipping Dionysus--and the consequences. There are many other videos of productions of The Bacchae on youtube.
The best translation of the play/opera The Bacchae may be found in a free version here. Study guide to the play here. See also this Introductory Note.

Apollo in Greco-Roman sculpture:


"Apollo Musagetes" (third image) depicts Apollo as leader of the Muses.


Read of Apollo's musical competition with Pan.