As a person interested in music of various genres, I recently made a little research on ancient music and found a few collections on some of great ancient civilizations.
Among those musical excerpts the one that amazed me most was those of Greece. In ancient Greece, music happened to be present in everything related to society, from marriages to funerals, to stage dramas etc, thus playing a significant role in their lives. The word music comes from the muses, the daughters of Zeus and patron goddesses of creative and intellectual endeavours and there are many archaeological remains depicting music being performed on ceramics. Pythagoras and his school laid the foundations of our knowledge of harmonics, it is often seen that the term 'music of the spheres' was used, meaning that music, for ancient Greeks, was rather a mathematical and philosophical description of the universe - the stars, the sun, the planets, vibrating in harmony.
About the music, Plato explained that;
Our music was once divided into its proper forms...It was not permitted to exchange the melodic styles of these established forms and others. Knowledge and informed judgment penalized disobedience. There were no whistles, unmusical mob-noises, or clapping for applause. The rule was to listen silently and learn; boys, teachers, and the crowd were kept in order by threat of the stick. . . . But later, an unmusical anarchy was led by poets who had natural talent, but were ignorant of the laws of music...Through foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that there was no right or wrong way in music, that it was to be judged good or bad by the pleasure it gave. By their works and their theories they infected the masses with the presumption to think themselves adequate judges. So our theatres, once silent, grew vocal, and aristocracy of music gave way to a pernicious theatrocracy...the criterion was not music, but a reputation for promiscuous cleverness and a spirit of law-breaking.
What Plato suggested here as the law-breakers were those such as Aristoxenus, who argued that the notes were to be judged, not by mathematics, but by the ear, describing further, as one should sing and play what sounded good and reasonable to people, for he could not hear the music of the spheres anyway.
The following musical excerpts are from a collection with the title Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians & Greeks, and it contains excerpts from Hurrian Hymns, dating back to 1250 BC. Hurrians were a people of Ancient Near East, in northern Mesopotamia, beginning approximately 2500 BC. It is possible that they originated in the Caucasus. The Hurrian texts from Ugarit, an ancient cosmopolitan port city, are the oldest known examples of written music, dating from 1800 BC. In these texts are found the names of four Hurrian composers, Tapšiẖuni, Puẖiya(na), Urẖiya, and Ammiya.
The ancient Chinese music involves the instrument Guqin, which has a long history dating back to almost 3000 years. Because of huge file size problem, unfortunately I could not add here any examples, however, those who are curious about it, may find a very good collection of examples here.
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Information was mostly taken from wikipedia.
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ancient chinese music?
ReplyDeleteid recommend this:
http://www.amazon.com/Yangguan-San-Die-Parting/dp/B000069JMB/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1252857975&sr=1-4
(buy a cd for a change!)
have a look at jiu kuang (wine madness) composed by Ruan Ji, the poet and wine drinker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruan_Ji
ok i am officially embarrased, yes we should buy cd's you're right.
ReplyDeleteAs for Ruan Ji, the following info is pretty interesting:
In his composition, Ruan Ji ridicules Confucians morals and rituals. “Appeared ruler and at once flourished cruelty, came into being vassals and at once appeared faithlessness and betrayal. Established rituals and laws, but people are bound and are not free. Cheating ignorant, duping simple people, hiding knowledge to seem being wise. The powerful ones are ruling and doing outrage, the weak ones are afraid and are serving to others. In appearance are disinterested, but in fact are grasping. Inside are insidious, but outside are amiable and polite. If made a crime – don’t regret, if you got luck – don’t enjoy…”