Stefan Hagel - Ancient Greek Music

This book endeavours to pinpoint the relations between musical, and especially instrumental, practice and the evolving conceptions of pitch systems. It traces the development of ancient melodic notation from reconstructed origins, through various adaptations necessitated by changing musical styles and newly invented instruments, to its final canonical form. It thus emerges how closely ancient harmonic theory depended on the culturally dominant instruments, the lyre and the aulos. These threads are followed down to late antiquity, when details recorded by Ptolemy permit an exceptionally clear perspective on the harmonic relations underlying the extant melody fragments. Dr Hagel discusses the textual and pictorial evidence, introducing mathematical approaches wherever feasible, but also contributes to the interpretation of instruments in the archaeological record and occasionally is able to outline the general features of instruments not directly attested. The book will be indispensable to all those interested in Greek music, technology and performance culture and the general history of musicology.

STEFAN HAGEL holds a research post at the Commission for Ancient Literature of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His interests focus on ancient Greek music and metre, including reconstruction of instruments and performance techniques. He also creates dedicated software for scholarly purposes and his Classical Text Editor received the European Academic Software Award.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521517645

First published 2010

Reprinted 2010