Oh dear, I'm still hunting for Kallistos' post on ancient music, and I'll have to wait until I get home to listen to his selections, but it's a fascinating subject!

Being half-Roman, I had never heard any kind of ancient music reconstructed until about 6-7 years ago, when I heard about the early Roman musical group, Synaulia. To say that their music is (a) nothing at ALL like the sound-track of Ben Hur and (b) a challenge for 21st century ears, hardly gets it. Especially peculiar was the (to me) raucous interjection of people with (literally) bells and whistles, whoops and hollars, at the oddest places. But it was intersting and it's slowly grown on me.

On the other hand, I've hardly ever had a chance to listen to Greek music unless it was some tapes Tanaquil kindly lent me of musical renditions of Homer's Iliad. Am I right that most poetry and epic was SUNG and chanted, rather than merely spoken? The tonal scale seemed less outrageous to my ignorant ears than that of Synaulia, but it was still NOTHING like what I would have expected.

And then you have the problem - this sounds like the Alexander the Great source issue! - of the long essay on Synaulia's discs, explaining that there isn't one living lick of written music anywhere on earth earlier than, say, 7th century or so, because they didn't have a system of notation (or if they did, none of it has ever come down to us). Synaulia went into great detail about how they've tried to reconstruct their music based on bits and pieces of literary commentary, descriptions of what kinds of instruments were played, when, and what for, etc. So it's very very risky to think they've gotten anywhere near it.

Do we have the same issues with ancient Greek music? (I would assume so . . .)