Benjamin Bagby

[Catherine Bott]

I'll do my best....in complete contrast, I'm spending today listening to programmes that haven't even been on air yet. I'm presenting next Sunday's Pick of the Week on R4, so do let me know if there's anything from R3 that you'd like me to investigate. I managed to get a minute of Schumann in last time.

[ardcarp]

may I query your claim that "We were listening to music as early as one is likely to hear."? I have (somewhere!) a cassette tape purporting to represent the music of the ancient Greeks and Romans - I think the material may be available online as well. The conjectures are made merely on the basis of the shape of ancient instruments, their materials and proportions, coupled with a few literary references as to their effects and (Pythagorean?) science.

Good point, decantor. I think there was an experiment a long time ago (can't remember where or when...Cambridge rings a bell) where a whole play by Aristophanes was sung or at least declaimed to music. Pythagoras certainly knew a thing or two about strings and their tuning.... Πυθαγόρεια κλίμακα. He discovered the mathematical ratio of the lengths of strings producing the octave (2:1) the fifth (3:2) and the fourth (4:3). There is also an annoying glitch in the theory of tuning known as the Pythagorean Comma, which can b eexplained briefly thus: if you tune perfect fifths from A upwards until you reach the next A (7 octaves away) it will be a different note from the A reached by simply tuning the 7 octaves. I expect eyes are beginning to glaze over, but one can surmise that (a) there must have been a lot of string plucking/bowing going on in the sixth century BC and (b) Pythagoras was a clevor old so-and-so whose interests extended beyong triangles (of the geometrical sort). Am I going off topic? Again?

[vinteuil]

... a distant memory - 1968 or 1969 I think - the few of us in the classics sixth form being taken by the Latin master to - of all places - Swindon - for an evening lecture given by a scholar in ancient Greek who had developed a theory of the music of the aulos and the double-aulos - followed by a recital on the aulos and the double aulos. I was sixteen; I was impressed...

.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aulos

.

http://ancestral.co.uk/romanreeds.htm

[doversoul1]

I'm presenting next Sunday's Pick of the Week on R4, so do let me know if there's anything from R3 that you'd like me to investigate. I managed to get a minute of Schumann in last time.

I’d say the Saturday’s Early Music Show was definitely one of the Pick of the Week. Where else can you hear anything so rare and fascinating? Or are you not allowed to pick your own programme?

ff
How about moving/copying Catherine’s request to somewhere more …er…prominent?

[Catherine Bott]

Bad form to pick myself, and anyway, I can only choose from programmes that go out after 7pm this evening, i.e. after this week's POTW. And I expect I'd have been told if a clip from yesterday had been chosen.

I'm thrilled that you and other Forum members liked it, that's good enough for me!

[decantor]

There is also an annoying glitch in the theory of tuning known as the Pythagorean Comma...

I'd not come across that particular Comma before....... how very curious! Thank you for the introduction.

To accompany vinteuil's references to ancient musical instruments, here's a a few pages on Greek ones that have been reconstructed - there are several sound samples of both aulos and cithara. It's quite an interesting site, with sound samples of genuine fragments, and even someone reading classical Greek texts while obeying pitch rules. (There's surely enough material all round to fill the 57 mins of EMS. You see? Not off-topic by much!)

http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agm/