Oddbean

I have been quite interested in reproducing early #music on modern instruments lately. It's quite hard to get your hands on any music scores earlier than Perotin and the Notre Dame 12th century music school, but I've been trying to harvest as many fragments as I could and reproduce them on guitar or piano to get a "feeling" of how such early music would have sounded - and which of its components may have influenced more recent forms of music. In this research, I recently stumbled (again) into the Seikilos epitaph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph, the oldest piece of music we've got in a complete form (est. 1st century AD), and I've tried to reproduce it on guitar as faithfully as I could. It's interesting because it reinforces my idea that the major/minor scale separation is something that happened relatively recently in Western music, and tonal centers were much more "blended" in earlier styles. This piece also confirms my hypothesis that, in earlier styles of music (both in Western and Indian musical traditions), the myxolidian scale was the most common "flavour" of major scale - i.e. take the major scale and flatten the 7th; this is a feature that you can still notice a lot both in Celtic and Indian traditional music. I can't formally pinpoint the key of this piece because it lacks a clear tonal center, but to me it definitely "feels" like A myxolydian (or maybe E dorian). The rhythmic figures used two millennia ago are also quite interesting. The first two bars have a familiar 6/8 rhythmic pattern that we can also find in many modern songs (𝆕 𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥 𝅭 𝄅 𝆕𝆕𝆕 𝅘𝅥𝅘𝅥 𝅭 𝄅 ), but the next two bars follow a rhythmic pattern that sounds quite unfamiliar to modern ears (𝅘𝅥 𝆕 𝆕 𝆕 𝆕 𝆕 𝄅 𝆕 𝅘𝅥 𝆕 𝅘𝅥 𝄅 ). I've also noticed that most of the vocal renditions of this piece of music that I've found online (included the one on Wikipedia) get the rhythm slightly wrong there compared to the actual score, in an effort to make it sounds more "familiar". A recurrent rhythmic figure is used as a cadence (𝆕 𝅘𝅥𝅘𝅥 𝅭𝆕 𝅘𝅥𝅘𝅥 ) that reminds me a lot of the Iambic meter that was quite common in the Greek and Latin poetry of that time. Even though I've seen this kind of rhythmic cadence in some old traditional Italian and Greek songs before, it's employed very rarely in modern (and even "classical") music. https://social-media.platypush.tech/media_attachments/files/111/136/893/030/771/982/original/4526528bfc8fa9b6.mp3