October
25
/ 2013
A musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University has been bringing back to life the music of ancient Greece, unheard for thousands of years, using a combination of archaeology and historical documents. Armand D'Angour has explained that in ancient Greece the classic texts and theatre used music – the epics of Homer, the love-poems of Sappho, the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides were all, originally, music. These well-known classics, dating from around 750 to 400 BC were all composed to be sung in whole or part to the accompaniment of the lyre, reed-pipes, and percussion instruments. The instruments are known from descriptions, paintings and archaeological remains, which enables researchers to establish the timbres and range of pitches they produced
