While you’re alive, shine:/ never let your mood decline./ We’ve a brief span of life to spend:/ Time necessitates an end. That little song is straight off an Ancient Greek column — and scholars think they know more about what its melody may have sounded like.

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John Terauds

John Terauds, Editor-Emeritus of Ludwig van Toronto, is currently a Divinity student at the University of Toronto and a church music director. He joined the Toronto Star in 1988, was the classical music critic from 2005 to 2012, and continues as a freelance critic for the paper. He is the co-author of Roy Thomson Hall: A Portrait, a book written with Toronto Star Colleague, William Littler.

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Inexplicably buried in the Business pages of the BBC News website is an article by one of those scholars, Armand d’Angour, Classics Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, explaining in lay language how he and his fellow travellers have been figuring out the music notation of Ancient Greece.

Unsurprisingly, the rules of intervals of two millennia-plus ago are not alien to our ears. D’Angour also writes of how the recitation of Homeric poetry might have sounded like.

You can find the story here.

This is Kostas Katsouranis singing his version of the Seikilos song:

Ideas about what Ancient Greek music sounded like are not new. Early Music specialists Atrium Musicae de Madrid, released Musique de la Grèce Antique, an album of 22 pieces reconstructed from bits of stone and papyrus about 35 years ago. The album is still available from Harmonia Mundi (details here).

The first song reminds me of the BACH note sequence that so many European composers have used as fugal subjects. There are others that sound like they could have come from serialist composers. Others sound Middle Eastern.

The Seikilos song is the 11th track:

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D’Angour is one of those inspirational academics whose curiosity takes him in all sorts of interesting directions. He is also a decent cellist.

Here is a TED lecture he gave last year on, among other things, musical patterns and the ways in which our brain processes them:

John Terauds

• Author
• Recent Posts

John Terauds

John Terauds, Editor-Emeritus of Ludwig van Toronto, is currently a Divinity student at the University of Toronto and a church music director. He joined the Toronto Star in 1988, was the classical music critic from 2005 to 2012, and continues as a freelance critic for the paper. He is the co-author of Roy Thomson Hall: A Portrait, a book written with Toronto Star Colleague, William Littler.

Latest posts by John Terauds (see all)

• Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
• Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
• CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019