Ostrakon #3: Understanding the Ancient World one (musical) note at a time
Hello and welcome back to the third installment of Ostrakon. Today’s entry is a thematic follow-on from last week’s post continuing the theme of music. It is a little rushed - for which I would like to apologise by reminding you of the usual Ostrakon-disclaimer (this series is a proof of concept and the research is the work of a single afternoon so please don’t yell at me if I get things wrong or miss out important aspects, but rather see that as an invitation to tell me and others about them). And as far as housekeeping goes I would like to thank everyone that has already submitted new drafts for the upcoming weeks and those people that have held themselves back from just utterly decking me for my endless pestering. You guys make this entire undertaking worth it.
Finally, one big shoutout to first-year student Alexander Sherborne is in order! He started his own column “The Chi Rho Chronicles” this week. Check it out here.
This week’s Ostrakon is a picture of Dr. Stefan Hagel performing on his replica of an ancient Greek Kithara. I discovered ir during last week’s research for the piece about Zooey Deschanel and Orpheus and it reminded me of the August of 2013. I spent that month interning at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in an attempt to figure out whether Classics is something I could study. I concluded that I could and well the rest is history as they say.
At the time, I was working for Mag. Aigner who works mainly on ancient myth and its reception as well as the history of ancient religion at the (then currently forming) Institut für Kulturgeschichte der Antike [IKAnt for short and whilst you are at it try do say that three times really fast]. The office I had my desk in was adjacent to Dr. Hagel’s and you can probably guess at this point what I got to hear coming through the wall. He is an expert on ancient musical theory and quite literally has written the book on it (you can find it in the further reading below). One reviewer called it “the most important treatment of Greek musical technicalities since Ptolemy” (Franklin 2011, p.228).
Now, I will not claim that I understood much of it (music and playing instruments are one of my numerous weaknesses after all), but that is also not the reason it appealed to me. What appealed to me was Dr. Hagel’s approach to the study of ancient music. As you may well know this series aims first and foremost to highlight how and why Classics is rightly called the first inter-discplinary science and Dr. Hagel is one of the premiere examples of this approach.
By taking recourse to both physics and human biology he was able to not only reconstruct ancient instruments from our sources, but also to put them to work to reawaken the sound of the ancient world; as a romantic like me would say.
Someone that has a more grounded view of reality on the other hand would say that he put these reconstructed instruments to work to delight conferences the world over and to answer questions arising from our sources on ancient music (such as epigraphy, papyri, the corpus of Mesomedes, and archaeological finds). Such a realist might very well like to check out Dr. Hagel’s website to gain further insights into ancient Greek music, Homeric singing, or the music of the ancient Near East. I would especially recommend the recording of Demodokos’ song about Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey 8, lines 267–366) sung in Homeric style.
If you for some (strange, unthinkable) reason do not feel like taking a trip to Vienna at this very moment to visit Dr. Hagel in person and learn from him directly, might I recommend Newcastle University instead? It is the home institution of Dr. David Creese, who just like Dr. Hagel is a founding member of MOISA (the International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music & its Cultural Heritage) and has published his influential monograph in 2010. Dr. Creese has similarly rebuild ancient instruments, but rather than answering questions about the technicalities of ancient instruments, he uses them to make advances in our understanding of ancient Greek philosophy and science (two concepts that have only fairly recently [in terms of human history] started to diverge in some people’s minds — after all even natural scientist are still given PhD’s, the title of Philosophiae doctor or Doctor of Philosophy upon completion of their studies).
One of these instruments and the subject of his monograph is the Monochord; a device with a single string stretched across a sounding box that was used to explain concepts of musical theory, physics, and mathematics in the Ancient World that I have struggled to understand since having had the chance to hear Dr. Creese play during one of my seminars (for the “Technologies of Knowledge” module designed by Dr. Horky) last year. And although I might still struggle to understand these concepts (and music in general) they have nonetheless left their mark on me due to the ingenious ways people smarter than me have studied them in the modern world. As I have mentioned above, my talent for music is rather limited, but if this has piqued your interest I would like to invite you to check out the two items of further reading below. And as always:
Take care :)
Further reading:
Creese, D.: “The Monochord in Ancient Greek Harmonic Science”. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2010).
Hagel, S.: “Ancient Greek Music. A New Technical History”. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009).
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