Ancient Greek Notation

Bringing together evidence preserved by Aristoxenus, Aristides Quintilianus, Ptolemy, Porphyry and the Greek musical handbooks in a unified framework, this article and its sequels show how the Classical modulation system reconstructed in Lynch 2018 is confirmed by the melodies recorded in the Greek musical documents. Taken jointly, these articles will offer the first comprehensive account of the use of notation tónoi in the ancient Greek musical documents that is fully consistent with the extant technical evidence on ancient harmonic theory and with literary testimonies about the harmonic innovations introduced by the New Musicians. The present article will focus on the Classical/Hellenistic harmonic system, whereas its Imperial counterpart will be discussed in a separate article. These theoretical analyses are based upon a newly developed database (dDAGM, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5181743) which collects all the musical notes attested in the standard edition of the Greek musical fragments (DAGM), for a total of over 3,400 notes.

This database, created by Dr Tosca A.C. Lynch, includes all the notes attested in the ancient Greek musical documents collected in the standard edition DAGM (Pöhlmann, E. and West, M.L., 2001, Documents of Ancient Greek Music, Oxford: OUP).

Dr Lynch will present historically informed interpretations of these data in a series of articles devoted, respectively, to:

–the Classical/Hellenistic harmonic system and the relative documents (marked as BC in this database);

–the Imperial harmonic system and the relative documents (marked as AD in this database)

Dubious readings follow Pöhlmann and West; DAGM 17-18 are grouped with Imperial documents, as discussed in the articles.

The database will be released under CC License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International upon publication of the articles that offer historically-informed interpretation of the data.