The Modes of Ancient Greek Music - D. B. Monro

The Seikelos inscription, as Dr. O. Crusius has shown (Philologus for 1893, LII. p. 161), is especially valuable for the light which it throws upon ancient rhythm. The quantity of the syllables and the place of the ictus is marked in every case, and we are able therefore to divide the melody into bars, which may be represented as follows:

The hymns recently discovered at Delphi.

Since these sheets were in type the materials for the study of ancient Greek music have received a notable accession. The French archaeologists who are now excavating on the site of Delphi have found several important fragments of lyrical poetry, some of them with the music noted over the words, as in the examples already known. The two largest of these fragments have been shown to belong to a single inscription, containing a hymn to Apollo, which dates in all probability from the early part of the third century B. C. Of the other fragments the most considerable is plausibly referred to the first century B. C. These inscriptions have been published in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique (viii-xii. pp. 569-610), with two valuable commentaries by M. Henri Weil and M. Théodore Reinach. The former scholar deals with the text, the latter chiefly with the music.

The music of the hymn to Apollo is written in the vocal notation. The metre is the cretic or paeonic

, and the key, as M. Reinach has shown, is the Phrygian—the scale of C minor, with the conjunct tetrachord c—d♭—d—f.

In the following transcription I have followed M. Reinach except in a few minor points. When two notes are sung to the same syllable the vowel or diphthong is repeated, as in the fragment of the Orestes ([p. 132]): but I have thought it best to adhere to the modern method.