3 ms·
This is not at all new news. We've known how to transcribe Greek notation since at least the early 20th century (and probably long before that; my memory of Gre
by theOnliest 11y ago
This is not at all new news. We've known how to transcribe Greek notation since at least the early 20th century (and probably long before that; my memory of Greek music theory is failing me this morning). This particular piece is one of Greek music's greatest hits, and has been in standard music history anthologies for at least 30 years or so, I'd imagine.
It's also not at all apparent that the Greeks used the mathematically pure ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 9:8) consistently in real music. One of the earliest debates in music theory is whether we should trust the ratios or the ear: Aristoxenus was advocating in the 4th c. BCE for a phenomenological view of intervals.
(And Ptolemy, whose intervals are supposedly used in this recording, had some truly bizarre scales in his text. He only allowed superparticular interval ratios, and so the standard Pythagorean semitone of 256:243 appears nowhere in his text.)