Transcript ANCIENT GREEK MUSIC - Welcome to Whitley County Schools

ANCIENT GREEK MUSIC
THE CLASSICAL ERA
WHY DO WE STUDY ANCIENT
GREECE?
• The enduring legacy of ancient Greece lies
in the brilliance of its ideas and the depth
of its literature and art. .
• Greek art, architecture, philosophy, and
religion have also inspired artists and
thinkers, who used them as starting points
for developing their own style of work.
ART & LITERATURE
• They developed
new pottery
techniques.
• Greeks painted
pottery and
turned an
everyday item
into art.
Apollo playing
the lyre
ART & LITERATURE
• Greek sculpture
and pottery
show images of
people enjoying
music and
dance.
THEY COMBINED
PERFORMANCES OF
DANCE, DRAMA, MUSIC,
AND POETRY.
ART & LITERATURE
• The Greeks invented drama.
• Actors wore colorful costumes and
masks; a chorus danced and sang as part
of each play.
• Comedies also were performed. These
plays displayed remarkable freedom of
speech in criticizing public policy and
making fun of politicians.
MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!
• Only a few examples of ancient
Greek music have survived.
• Greek philosophers theorized about
the origin, nature, and function of
music. The Greeks held music in the
highest esteem and realized the
power it held on the listener.
MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!
• Plato believed music had potentially
dangerous spiritual, psychological
and political influence .
MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!
• The ancient Greeks also believed
that music had power over human
emotions and behavior and that
when written in the various modes
(scales), music would cause
predictable reactions.
MUSIC WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
TO THE ANCIENT GREEKS!
• Melodies and rhythms in vocal music
were related to the rhythms and
speech inflections of the text;
instrumental music may have been
similarly related to dance movement.
ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS
• We do know what kind of instruments
the Greeks had. They had pipes, and
lyres, and drums, and cymbals.
ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS
• Their pipes were made from wood or
reeds, with holes cut in them for your
fingers to play the tune. Some were
played vertically, like a recorder, and
some were played sideways, like a flute.
ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS
• Sometimes people played more than one
pipe at a time. Pipes and drums were
played in a loud, lively way, for dancing,
and people played this music when they
were worshipping Dionysus, the god of
wine and parties.
ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS
• The Greeks also had lyres, which are
like small harps, and might have
sounded something like a guitar.
ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS
• Both women and men played musical
instruments. We often see them
represented on vases.
• Wealthy boys were taught at school to
play on the lyre, and to sing.
ANCIENT GREEK INSTRUMENTS
• Wealthy girls may have been taught at
home, because they usually could not go
to school.
• But most of the women we see playing
instruments on vases seem to be poor
women (often slaves).
MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC
• Pythagoras, lived in the 6th century
B.C., taught that numbers explained
the world and started the study of
mathematics in Greece.
MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC
• Pythagoras developed the
mathematical formulas that are still
used today in creating music modes
(scales) and other elements of theory
and sound.
MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC
• Pythagoreans thought that the
heavenly bodies are separated from
one another by intervals
corresponding to the harmonic
lengths of strings, they held that the
movement of the spheres gives rise
to a musical sound—the “harmony of
the spheres.”
MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC
• Pythagoras, thought the so-called
music of the spheres to be a
perfectly harmonious music,
inaudible on earth, produced by the
movement of the stars and planets.
MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC
• The astronomy of the Pythagoreans
marked an important advance in
ancient scientific thought, for they
were the first to consider the earth as
a globe revolving with the other
planets around a central fire.
MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC
• They explained the harmonious
arrangement of things as that of
bodies in a single, all-inclusive
sphere of reality, moving according
to a numerical scheme.
MUSIC, MATH, AND LOGIC
• They believed that music
represented the order and harmony
of the universe and that by studying
the acoustical properties of musical
intervals they would come closer to
understanding the cosmos.