Customer Reviews

Musique de la Grece Antique

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the oddest CDs in my collection. It's full of strange and rare beauty, very powerful, very dramatic.
The sound is simple but unique...I'm sure most of the instruments played here are ones I've never heard elsewhere. I love the vocals. They make my mind wander back many centuries, and fancy myself watching a great Greek play in its original production !

There are so many incredible pieces...the first track, starting with it's "sonorous explosion", and continuing with a melodic chorus...# 4, "Plainte de Tecmessa" is short but exquisite and moving, with a flute alternating with the singer. Each of these 22 tracks are fascinating, and have an almost sacred quality to them. Total running time is 52:39.

What Gregorio Paniagua and his ensemble have done here is remarkable. Recreating out of the scraps of what has been found on papyri, etc., and aided by inspiration and imagination, this long forgotten music, and the instruments it was played on. If you like exploring the musical culture of other eras, and other nations, this is a treat.

I used to own the original LP of this revelatory recording. It had some of the best and most extensive liner notes I have ever seen, regarding the music on the recording, the way the performers decided to arrange and treat it, and the great variety of instruments that the ancient Greeks used. The liner notes of this CD are missing nearly all of this material. Thus, the listener is unable to follow all the nuances of how and why the performers "breathed new life" into this ancient and often fragmentary material. Sometimes they used silence, sometimes notes, sometimes dissonances to fill in the lacunae; and without the original liner notes, one finds it hard to follow where history ends and creativity begins.

Nevertheless, the rendition of this music is not as speculative as Paul Yost would have one believe. The notations used in the source material have their difficulties (one of which is that theory and practice didn't always coincide in the use of the notations); but there is no serious disagreement as to how the melodies should read, and the performers take care to draw on authoritative renditions. The reconstructed period instruments are well-made and have fascinating tone colors; and they are very similar to those heard on "Music of the Ancient Greeks" by Pandourion Records (which I recommend for a different treatment of the melodies). Of course one may always arrange these melodies in various ways, but the Greeks surely did no less (being attuned as they were to perfecting the *melos* or combination of words and melodies).

Finally, the Greeks were by no means the first to create a coherent musical art in the West. (Why do people always claim this?) The Hebrews beat them by many centuries, and the Egyptians and Mesopotamians before that. Greece was the pupil of these nations, musically speaking. I recommend "Music of the Bible Revealed", also on Amazon.com, for a view of another form of ancient music, at once simpler and more harmonic than ancient Greek music, yet based on similar theoretical norms. For more information on ancient music, please visit http://www.kingdavidsharp.com.

The first remark concerns the instruments of this music, instruments that have been reconstituted on the model of the ancient ones. We will consider them as germanely faithful, and they create sounds, a sound environment or ambience that is particularly original. The second remark is that this music is based on the pythagorian five-note scale that corresponds to the first five degrees of our modern major scale. Then a second group of these five degrees and intervals are added to the first five in a second identical group constituting a ten-note scale that will be the basis of all western music up to the Renaissance, and thus the basis of all Christian sacred music of the Middle Ages, a music known as gregorian. So, in this surprising sound ambience we also recognize some elements we have already heard and enjoyed in our heritage. Just take track # 3, ? Premier hymne delphique ? Apollon ?. Some of the chords are so close to gregorian music, and yet the instruments are so different, that we may think we are at the crossroads between some extraterrestrial music and gregorian chanting. In fact we are here at the very source of gregorian music that was to borrow everything from ancient Greek music. And then put this track # 3 in parallel with track # 16, ? Hymne chr?tienne (sic) d'Oxyrhynchus ? and you will hear the direct filiation. Track # 8 will provide you with the model of the traditional musics we find in the mountainous areas of the Mediterranean, Sicilia, Sardinia, Corsicca and Provence, among others, the music of shepherds and fishermen when coming back to land, a music that will become religious and christian later on and that still exists, mainly in the form of a polyphony. But the worst part - and also the best in a way - is that we only have fragments, tidbits, and that it is the concrete realization of the tremendous waste history has willed us and yet also the concrete evidence that history is never able to destroy something completely and that we have the means to reconstruct what has been destroyed with a specific procedure of genetic musical archaeology. To conclude we must take into account this recording is from 1978, i.e. a long time ago. To get a more complete vision we have to look for more recent recordings.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Universit? Paris Dauphine, Universit? Paris I Panth?on Sorbonne

I loved this cd. It has a professional feel to the music. It evokes images from the period that are distinct, useful, and complimentary to examination of the time. There seems to have been a real effort at authentication of the sounds of the era without over stepping the claims of its ultimate veracity. I was delighted and surprised at its very existence.

My only complaint would be that I was left wanting more. Knowledge of the exact origins and history of each piece would be useful.

music from the 4th century BCE? This CD represents an obvious adherence to what is at best, guesswork. Still, with Gregorio Paniagua conducting the Atrium Musicae De Madrid, I can almost see the "Huppocrites" (play actors) on a stage at Delphi chanting and pounding out the first real attempts at solidifying a coherency in western music. Sometimes frantic, almost invading styles of introductions, alert one to the fantastic possibility that this is indeed how it may have sounded so long ago. From these swells to melancholy whispers and ancient recitals, combined with excellent timing and very resourceful use of their respective instruments, any serious student of western culture and certainly of Greek culture should listen to this CD.

This is one of the most - if not the most - peculiar recordings I own. Introduced to me by the owner of a classical music store/musician, I was at first stunned by the shock of primaeval rhythms and atonal soundscapes; but the intensely curious historian in me piqued my attention. Different from anything (I deliberately seek out the strange and unusual in music) we might hear in the world today, this album transports me into an almost hypnotic state in which my imagination runs rampant across the centuries. As a historian, I crave the full experience of past cultures: art, music, science, society, philosophy, politics, any aspect that deepens my understanding and knowledge.

I love the impeccable research that went into this production: the reconstruction of ancient Greek instruments based on sculptures and vases, the reconstruction of contemporary notations, and the attempt at ancient pronounciations (very strange). I am aware of the differences between ancient and modern Greek as my mother has studied ancient Greek for decades - she owns scholarly recordings of individuals speaking Homerian Greek for the stage (unnatural, drawn out, with crescendos and diminuendos). How accurate is mere supposition. But this recording is strikingly similar. Also fascinating is that manuscript (papyri) gaps were filled in with logic and imagination; what painstaking work. Even so, the compositions are short.

It is not entirely ancient Greek: there is Roman piece, and post CE pieces. This does not interfere with the overall impression, however. The sounds here are not melodic, but dissonant, rough, grating, sharply delineated, but utterly compelling. And if one listens long enough, there is a method to all this madness, much like peeling an onion: persistence pays off, and further layers of delight are revealed. As a side note, I have often played this for friends, even those whose tastes are more conventional than mine. Everyone has loved it.

A favourite; a treat for the senses.

This CD's almost worth it just for the first track.

I really enjoy this CD. I'm no music expert, but I think some ancient or ethnic music tends to either be monotonous or just plain weird to the Western ear. This is not one of them. It's at times dark, mysterious, playful, melodic, and overall sets a nice mellow mood. I found it indispensable for my Roman dinner party. My only (small) complaints are that the vocals sometimes seem a little over-the-top (probably much intended to be theatrical) and the volume of the tracks is uneven (some are much softer than others). I enthusiastically recommend this CD - good, reasonably-priced pre-Medieval music is tough for me to find. This is it.

This music is almost like hearing ghosts. In a way the listener does hear ghosts, for the music has been saved from oblivion, and experts do not know everything about it. As much as possible, traditional instruments have been reconstructed based on pictures found on documents like vases and paintings. Sometimes you hear only a little fragment of something, about a minute. It's intriguing to think about who may have sung/played this music. The notes explain some of the technical details; musicologists will find that interesting. Because I know little about music, I wish for better notes about other things. For example, I would like more information in English about provenance, titles, and lyrics--as far as they are known. I wanted to know the words I heard sung. Other than the shortage of helpful notes, this is very interesting music.

This is indeed a weird and "creative" recreation with lots of imaginative, sometimes absurd background sounds not properly historic. The Greek they speak is naive, and amateurish. We lost that original music because of a lack of music notation, which is a terrible loss. The Oxyrhynchus Papyrus melody may be the best of the selections.

I was expecting something a little more vigorous. But it is still fun. In a sober way.