Lost and Not Lost

I don't have a proper tag for this! I just ran across a fascinating article on the loss and preservation of ancient literature. The author dismisses the story that it was Christians who were responsible for the burning of ancient pagan libraries and instead finds a lot of evidence that the survival of much ancient literature was due to the Christians. I ran across a number of interesting facts that I was not aware of:

• It has been claimed that about ten million words of classical Greek and one million words of classical Latin, excepting Christian works, have come down to us. Of the former, two million words are the medical corpus of Galen alone, while of the later about a third is made up of the surviving three quarters of the works of Cicero. In fact, whereas much classical Greek is technical and not of interest to the general reader, nearly all preserved classical Latin is worth reading in its own right.
• So just what proportion of ancient literature has been lost? This is difficult to answer but we can get a rough estimate from the size of ancient libraries. Archaeology suggests that the biggest contained 20,000 or so scrolls and the Great Library of Alexandria itself is most reliably said to have contained 40,000. On the other hand, all the extant pagan classical works would not fill much more than a thousand scrolls so we have been left with about 5% of what might be found (barring repeat copies) in Rome. As for Latin, we have the names of 772 classical authors.  Of these, not a word survives from 276 of them.  We have fragments ranching from an aphorism to several pages of 352 of the authors.  Of the remaining 144, we possess at least one of their works but rarely all of them.

Wow! I had no idea that Greek literature amounted to so much more than Latin. Nor that the level differed so much, the Greek being much more technical and the Latin more popular. 95% lost.

• Some of the reasons that important literature disappeared are in fact very prosaic. The most important was language. When the Roman Empire was at its height the educated classes could read both Latin and Greek but after the fourth century the two languages split on geographical grounds with Greek completely dying out in Western Europe. In the East, Latin was first confined to the army and then disappeared altogether. As late as the thirteenth century the humanist scholar Petrarch could bemoan in a letter to Nicolas Sygeros that he was unable to read any of his collection of Greek manuscripts. Clearly, copying a manuscript that no one understands is not going to be a priority so Latin in the East and Greek in the West was lost.
• This is also the reason for the near total lack of scientific scholarship in Western Europe before the translations into Latin of the High Middle Ages. There never was a scientific tradition in Latin, only popular writings like Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Once Greek died out, these were all that anyone could read and the technical Greek works (apart from one or two like Plato's Timeaus that had already been translated into Latin) were lost to the West.

Again, wow. No scientific tradition in Latin. For some reason this never dawned on me, I suppose because I tend to read much more in Greek authors than Latin ones. Now that I think of it, the Latin authors are poets, biographers, historians and not writers on science. How odd!

• Today we regret how much has been lost but we have been remarkably careless ourselves. Many classic television serials, such as Doctor Who from the 1960s, have disappeared because at the time no one felt they were important enough to use up video tape for. Even more tragically, large numbers of early movies like the second part of the incomparable Wedding March (1928) have been lost through carelessness and the perishability of nitrate film (for further details see here). Some surviving classics were preserved in a single print. To those of us who mourn the loss of classical literature this is a depressingly familiar story.

Yes, and the recent fire at the Universal archive in which a lot of master tapes of popular music were lost shows that the problem is ongoing. I preserved some files on zip drives that I no longer have any means of reading, for example.

Just as a footnote to the nature of preserved Greek literature: we have a number of texts on Greek music theory by people like Aristoxenus, but almost no actual music. The Greeks lacked a good system of music notation, but they were very interested in the theory of music and that had a significant influence on the later development of Arabic and Western European notions of music theory. I was very amused to read in the introduction to Gustave Reese's book Music in the Middle Ages with an Introduction on the Music of Ancient Times (published 1940 and one of the first books in English on the topic) that when he consulted a classical scholar about ancient Greek music theory he was told to avoid it completely as "that way lies madness!"

Still reading Arthur Rubinstein's autobiography and he just mentioned Stravinsky's Piano Rag Music, the first piece of any importance he wrote for piano and which was dedicated to Rubinstein:

Rubinstein couldn't make much sense of it and didn't play it much. Last night I listened to the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra playing the 1947 Petrushka ballet score by Stravinsky. Excellent performance conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada and excellent quality:

Every time I hear that I am astonished at how good the music is.

The Oldest Melody: 1400 BC?

The oldest written music we supposedly have is of a melody transcribed from a Hurrian tablet in cuneiform. Here is a link with more information:

The hymn was discovered on a clay tablet in Ugarit, now part of modern-day Syria, and is dedicated the Hurrians’ goddess of the orchards Nikkal.

The clay tablet text, which was discovered alongside around 30 other tablet fragments, specifies 9 lyre strings and the intervals between those strings – kind of like an ancient guitar tab.

But this is the only hymn that could be reconstructed – although the name of the composer is now lost.

Here is a translation of the associated text:

‘Once I have endeared the deity, she will love me in her heart,
the offer I bring may wholly cover my sin,
bringing sesame oil may work on my behalf in awe may I'

And here is a performance on lyre:

Because I have studied old notations (Paleography, a doctoral seminar in musicology) I know how rudimentary musical notation was before the invention of the staff and rhythmic values around 1000 AD. So I tend to listen to these "reconstructions" with a jaundiced ear. A remarkable number of the more ambitious ones end up sounding a lot like Carl Orff because he wrote music that he wanted to suggest ancient music. In other words, we are not hearing or reconstructing anything with any authenticity, we are mostly just projecting.

This rendition is a little bit different. Frankly it sounds (and looks) exactly like what someone might have improvised at Burning Man! Modal improvisation given a few rudimentary notes may have remained pretty much the same throughout human history. Thank god we invented something better!

Here is another realization of, I think, the same melody. This one is more ambitious and manages to sound like an introduction to Kashmir by Led Zeppelin:

Bear in mind that everything you hear, apart from the single notes, everything else, the rhythms, the drones, the arpeggios, is the complete invention of the performer (s).

Mind you, it does make you want to rub sesame oil all over yourself, doesn't it?

Depths and Dimness, part 2

One of the things I wanted to get to yesterday, but could only hint at, is how much our view of the past is influenced by the fact that it is our view, from our perspective. I was outraged the first time I encountered Richard Taruskin's brilliant discussion of the Early Music Movement and particularly the concept of 'authenticity' that was so important. He pointed out, against considerable protest and resistance, that the values of modernism: crisp execution within strict tempi, for example, were precisely the values that were supposedly the 'authentic' ones of early music performance. Why? Well, because it was musicians from the same generation that were both creating modern music and re-creating Baroque music.

This brings me back to my sardonic remark of yesterday: "why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff?"
 Well, it doesn't, of course, but any musician/scholar of today is going to be unconsciously looking to come up with something that sounds 'ancient' and since there are no models, then the primitivism of Orff will inevitably lurk in the back of one's mind. Ancient music notation is so vague and confusing that it is like a Rorschach inkblot upon which we can project whatever is on our minds. Here is the Orff piece:

At the root of both modernism and the search for ancient music are the same aesthetic values. As Taruskin points out, early music performance is precisely 'authentic' if it does reflect our aesthetic values. How else could it be?

But still, the urge to hear, to understand music that is far from us, like capturing an image of a moon of Saturn in a flyby, never quite leaves us. But we will only be affected by the music if we do somehow share aesthetic values with it. Often, like the music by Carl Orff, we will be merely projecting our aesthetic values on music that may not share them... The book to read is the collection of essays Text and Act by Richard Taruskin.

The Depths and Dimness of Music History

I was tempted to title this "Why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff" but while catchy, it's not quite accurate. This deserves a longer post, but I wanted to put up a few thoughts as an introduction. Here is the problem: what did the music of previous times sound like? This is partly an historical problem and partly a notational problem. Historians tend to disagree even about recent events such as the American Civil War or even the Kennedy assassination. Imagine how much disagreement there could be about ancient Babylonian music.

Music is an ephemeral art--or it was until recording technology was invented little more than 100 years ago. As soon as a piece is performed, it vanishes into the air. For much of human history music was created and played spontaneously. In a few places the need developed to put something down as an aid to memory. Perhaps the priests wanted to be sure they got the hymn correct so the god would not be displeased. This might be the reason that the Hurrian Songs were preserved in cuneiform. Thanks to Jon Silpayamanant for the suggestion. But what are the odds that anything scholars have come up with bears any resemblance to the actual music? It is even a bit of a speculation that what we have is a musical score:

It was the unsystematic succession of the interval names, their location below apparently lyric texts, and the regular interpolation of numerals that led to the conclusion that these were notated musical compositions. 

But the sound of a piece of music can vary immensely even if it is a piece from the recent past. Imagine you had a simple song chart for "My Way". You might perform it this way:

Or this way:

Both ways are "My Way".

It was only in the 19th century that musicians started thinking about the music of the past. Before then, a particularly diligent composer like J. S. Bach might collect and study scores of his predecessors going back a couple of generations, but most music heard was very recent. The exception is folk music, which can be much older. So in the 19th century scholars started digging around in old libraries and unearthed scores going back a long way indeed. The Catholic Church had been preserving chants going back a millenium, but scholars discovered much, much more.

After a while, performers wanted to explore this music as well and in the 20th century a few pioneers started trying to revive Baroque and Renaissance music. At first they played it just the way they would play any music. But then the realization dawned that this music was performed very differently than Brahms, say, or Elgar. In the 1960s and 70s the Early Music Movement was born and we started hearing a whole new spectrum of musical sounds:

I have to end here, but I will post more later...