Dance of the Spartans - Ancient Greek Music

Music by Farya Faraji, based on melodic folk motifs from Greece. I was inspired to write an immersive piece of music as close as possible to historical practices of Ancient Greece—please keep in mind that this isn’t meant to be entirely historically accurate music from Ancient Greece, although it’s closer to realistic compared to some of my more creative pieces. The instruments are all from the soundscape of Ancient Greece: the aulos, the lyre, and a mantoura—the latter is a simple reed instrument from Crete, and such instruments are attested in Ancient Greece. I based this on motifs found across Crete, the Cyclades and Thrace, since they are the modern day regions that still use such reed instruments like in Ancient Greece, and therefore their sound is our best bet, in my opinion, at reverse-engineering the most probable usage of these instruments throughout the Greek world, given that they were ubiquitous throughout Greece back then. The melody is possible given what we know of the historical practice, with the usage of the Phrygian mode (what we call today the Dorian mode), although it’s not certain how folk melodies for dances were built, and whether they were ornamented in such a way especially before the Roman era, were ornamentation becomes more increasingly used. Most of the creative aspect on my part lies in two aspects: the strumming of the lyre to provide a constant drone constituted of the tonic and it’s lower perfect fourth—strumming was a major part of lyre playing in Greece, however it seemed to have been melodic strumming. The sort of drone strumming I added to support the melody is entirely speculative, however it is based on common practice of heterophonic traditions of today, like in modern Greek traditional music, where an instrument will strum the tonic repeatedly as a steady drone. While this practice isn’t directly attested in Ancient Greek music, I consider it compatible with the heterophonic nature of this tradition, whose monophonic aspect is often exagerated. A far more creative and less plausible aspect however is the usage of harmony—I switched the drone to the subtonic in moments of cadence, and also added a lower perfect fourth to the main drone. While far more creative in this aspect, the research of some specialists like Stefen Hagel suggests a far more prevalent use of harmony than usually believed. If harmony were to exist within the largely heterophonic and melodic framework of Ancient Greek music, I believe it would have come in the form the absolute simplest forms such as those found in the Cyclades or Thrace on which I based the harmonic aspects of this piece, where the lower perfect fourth sounded in unison with the tonic as well as cadence-ornamenting subtonic use is prevalent. Once again, the harmony I’ve included as well as the drone-strumming are not meant to indicate my belief of their presence in Ancient Greek music, but are rather my way of showing that there would have been different compositional techniques accompanying the melody beyond the pure monophony that we are often told Ancient Greek music functionned with—strumming of the tonic to produce a drone and very simple harmony may have well constituted the palette of this tradition, which I tried conveying here.