How To Play The Music Of Ancient Greece (3 of 4)

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Klezfiddle1
November 09, 2009

How to play "The First Delphic Hymn To Apollo (c.138 BCE)! A studio quality recording of this piece can be heard on track 9 of my NEW ALBUM, "An Ancient Lyre": http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ml... For f...

How to play "The First Delphic Hymn To Apollo (c.138 BCE)! A studio quality recording of this piece can be heard on track 9 of my NEW ALBUM, "An Ancient Lyre": http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mlevy4

For full details, visit: http://www.ancientlyre.com

This is my latest "online lyre lesson", demonstrating how to play the famous "First Delphic Hymn to Apollo" - a precious surviving fragment of music, which is an amazing legacy from the mostly lost musical culture of ancient Greece!

There are two Delphic Hymns that have been discovered, and they were dedicated to the god Apollo. Unlike the famous "Song of Seikilos" (the first COMPLETE piece of music that has been so far found to have survived from antiquity), the two Delphic Hymns have sadly not survived in their complete form. However, they do survive in substantial fragments...giving just a tantilizing taste of the glory of the tragically lost, magnificant musical culture of ancient Greece!

The two Delphic Hymns are dated c.138 BC and 128 BC. My rendition here, is of the earlier of them; the First Delphic Hymn. Although it has unfortunately not survived in its complete form, the First Delphic Hymn to Apollo is THE earliest unambiguous surviving fragment of notated music from ANYWHERE in the Western World! It is written in the ALPHABETICAL musical notation system used in ancient Greece, whereby alphabetical notation describing the pitch of the melody, is written above the text of the song, as can be clearly seen in this image of the actual Delphic Hymn, as it was found, inscribed in marble:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topi...

The rhythm can easily be inferred from the syllables of the text.

The First Delphic Hymn to Apollo was discovered in 1893 by a French archaeologist. It was inscribed in marble, carved on an outside wall of the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi.

All that is known about its composer is that it was written by an Athenian, around 138 BC, since the part of the inscription giving the name of the composer is too difficult to read. The Second Delphic Hymn is slightly more recent, and has been dated to precisely 128 BC; evidently it was first performed in the same year. The name of the composer of the Second Delphic Hymn has also survived, in a separate inscription: he is called "Limenius". The occasion of the later hymn was the Pythian Festival, and this one, the earlier hymn, was probably written for the boys choir at the Pythian Games in 138 BC.

I am using a lyre very similar to the ancient Greek Kithara; the large wooden lyre favoured by the professional musicians of ancient Greece. My lyre is, in fact, a replica (based on an illustration of the instrument on an ancient Jewish coin), of the ancient Jewish "Kinnor"; the large wooden lyre which King David himself played 3000 years ago, as he danced before the Ark of the Covenant, and which for almost 1000 years, was played by the Levite musicians in the Temple of Jerusalem to accompany the singing of the Levitical Choir. The Kinnor and Kithara are indeed so similar,(even down to the very sound of the names given to these lyres!) that there may well have even been some cross-cultural musical influences between the cilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Israel??

The translation of the fragment of text which has survived of the this, the First Delphic Hymn to Apollo, is as follows:

"Hear me, you who posses deep-wooded Helicon,
fair-armed daughters of Zeus the magnificent!
Fly to beguile with your accents your brother,
golden-tressed Phoebus who, on the twin peak of this rock of Parnassus,
escorted by illustrius maidens of Delphi,
sets out for the limpid strams of Castalia, traversing,
on the Delphic promontory, the prophetic pinnacle.
Behold glorious Attica, nation of the great city which,
thanks to the prayers of the Tritonid warrior,
occupies a hillside sheltered from all harm.
On the holy alters Hephaestos cosumes the thighs of young bullocks,
mingled with the flames, the Arabian vapor rises towards Olympos.
The shrill rustling lotus murmurs its swelling song, and the golden kithara,
the sweet-sounding kithara, answers the voice of men.
And all the host of poets, dwellers in Attica, sing your glory, God,
famed for playing the kithara, son of great Zeus,
beside this snow-crowned peak, oh you who reveal to all mortals
the eternal and infallible oracles.
They sing how you conquered the prophetic tripod
guarded by a fierce dragon when, with your darts
you pierced the gaudy, tortuously coiling monster,
so that, uttering many fearful hisses, the beast expired.
They sing too, . . . ."

Category: Music

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How To Play The Music Of Ancient Greece (3 of 4)

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