Kallipolian Dance - Ancient Greek Music

Arrangement by Farya Faraji. This is another historically informed approximation of what Ancient Greek music may have sounded like based on the available evidence and current working theories. Many thanks to @SEIKILO Museum for building me this wonderful reconstructed phorminx lyre using period strings. Check out their amazing channel and site: https://seikilo.com Explore the musical instruments of the ancient world at SEIKILO: https://www.youtube.com/@SEIKILO The Phorminx heard in this recording was handcrafted in Greece by the Koumartzis family of LUTHIEROS: https://luthieros.com This improvisation is in the enharmonic genus of the Ancient Greek modes, the one that employed dense microtonal intervals which sound extremely alien and out of tune to our modern ears. According to many scholarly frameworks such as those of prof. Stefan Hagel, Armand d'Angour and Barnaby Brown, Ancient Greek music was in many ways a polyphonic form of music which employed a dichordal framework of each note being accompanied by another one. This would have expressed itself on the Ancient Greek lyre through the block-and-strum technique, which was the main way Greeks played the lyre. Unlike the modern notion of playing it like a harp be plucking the strings with the fingers, which would have been secondary, the lyre's strings were primarily strummed with a plectrum, with the fingers muting the strings not to be heard, leaving out only the one, or ones, to be heard. Within the dichordal framework, the fingers would thus leave at all times two strings open, that harmonised with one another. The evidence is clear that this dichordal framework would have applied to all genuses, including the enharmonic, which had grown strange even to the ears of Ancient Greeks themselves by the Hellenistic era. The question of how such a polyphony would have worked is unknown, so this performance is a tentative test into the question. I mostly kept the dichords limited to a drone on the tonic being the accompanying "harmony" for the melody, with occasional usage of other notes harmonising with the microtones. The rhythm is in 7 metres, which is attested in the sources and known to have existed in Ancient Greek music. For more information on the academic sources consulted in this reconstruction, check out the Epic Talking playlist where I interview scholars on the subject of Ancient Greek music, as well as analyse scholarly sources.