H.'s subtitle, ‘A New Technical History’, could mean both that this book is an updated history of ancient Greek music written from a technical perspective, and that this book is a history of ancient Greek music that has updated the technical perspective that was established one and one half centuries ago. What it does not make clear is that this is an intricate history written somewhat from the inside out or from finish to start. If it did not expound a brilliant empirical analysis supported by an ample scholarly apparatus and unparalleled technical expertise, one might even call it a mystery, the resolution of which is discovered only in the last few of its 453 pages of text. Those in a hurry may want to start at the end and work backwards, chapter by chapter, until the assumptions and conclusions proved or at least amply and forcibly argued by the end of the book can be applied to what had seemed to be unsupported premises at the outset. Those not in a hurry and who have previously attempted to penetrate not just the technical aspects of ancient Greek music theory but also all of the several dozen musical fragments in the 2001 Pöhlmann/West DAGM and remaining fragments of string and wind instruments should begin at the beginning and savour the revolutionary approach H. applies to a host of traditionally thorny problems and the irrefutable, persuasive or at least plausible solutions he demonstrates and illustrates throughout the book. Indeed, H. has rethought so many of the assumptions scholars have compiled and used since Bellermann in the 1840s, his book almost requires a commentary to help the unprepared reader comprehend the importance of his contribution and how it fits into the history of scholarship in this relatively arcane and somewhat forbidding field. Those of us who have been following H.'s contributions to this field (he has made important contributions elsewhere) over the past decade or so have been eagerly anticipating this book, and it does surely offer a dazzling, compelling and comprehensive overview of ancient Greek music, music theory and organology.
H. has demonstrated repeatedly that he has a command of both the material, mechanical, and acoustical properties of ancient wind instruments, and the two prominent musical notational systems schematised and discussed to a limited extent in our extant theoretical sources and employed in our five dozen or so musical fragments. Fluent in handling the latter and practised in the former, he has developed into what could be described as the best ancient Greek musician since the dissipation of Greco-Roman culture. His facility with the actual production of authentically reproduced Greek instrumental music has enabled him to revolutionise the way modern scholarship understands the origins and development of ancient Greek music and music theory. While traditional and contemporary scholarship in ancient Greek music has understandably established its preliminary assumptions that the music that accompanied the poetry of Homer, Sappho, Pindar and the tragic poets was the essence of ancient music, H. hypothesises and then demonstrates that it was instrumental music, not vocal music, and primarily aulos music, not lyre or cithara music, which dictated the development of musical notation and its accompanying theory.
The benefits of this approach are revealed page after page. He applies it successfully to the development of the genera from the enharmonic to the chromatic, the development of the tonoi from the traditional Dorian and Lydian to the extended list of fifteen keys, and the development of Ptolemy's canon of seven and Boethius' of eight. He accounts for the difficulty Ptolemy experienced by attempting to organise his system around string lengths. He accounts for the absence of absolute pitch, the koinê hormasia, the various shades of tuning and Vitruvius' resonators. He even devotes a chapter to ‘Going Beyond Ptolemy?’. Most illuminating perhaps is his chapter on ‘The Extant Musical Documents’. He works through the DAGM catalogue chronologically with some important results. In fact, his discussion of the Iphigenia in Aulis fragment (Pap. Leiden Inv. P. 510) [DAGM #3] proves that Hyperaeolian tonality cannot be assigned to the fragment because he has earlier worked out the chronological development of the keys and shown that the Hyperaeolian is not even part of the Aristoxenian system and therefore postdates the music of the papyrus. For the first Delphic Hymn, the Athenaeus paean [DAGM #20], he differentiates the first section with its archaic-style melody and the second section which contains rapid modulations associated with Timotheus and the ‘New Music’, both in turn different from the Second Hymn, Limenios' paean [DAGM #21], which follows the more traditional citharodic line appropriate for Limenios who was a citharist.
This reviewer does not mind admitting that H. rightly took my reading of the Seikilos Inscription [DAGM #23] to task, asserting (p. 286) that its octave does not belong to Ptolemy's tunings but one fourth lower. At the time (1986) I was attempting to demonstrate simply that the apparent gulf between our musical fragments and musical theoretical literature was not an impassable divide. In his extraordinary book H. has taken this approach so much further, and with much more accurate results, applying an innovative and practice-oriented approach to several different fields of ancient Greek music and producing a comprehensive new understanding of this important aspect of ancient Greek life, literature and science. Of course many questions remain open, as H. admits. He makes a number of references to the eight-stringed lyre, and discusses at length ‘lyre range’, Ptolemy's lyra, those described by Boethius and Nicomachus, and lyre physics (pp. 76–92), but he fails to account for the reality that the vast majority of lyres and citharas depicted on vases have seven strings.
Although filled with clear and illustrative diagrams, the book is unnecessarily difficult to access. He never really explains what Dorian or Lydian music was, although his kernel assumptions include such statments that the Dorian was the ‘natural centre’ of, for instance, the Aristoxenian system, or that ‘in the Roman period, whenever citharodes used the natural key, they called it the “Lydian” like everyone else – except Ptolemy’ (p. 58). He makes many references to his 2000 book Modulation in altgriechischer Musik and his individual articles, but he omits the simple sentence or three that would help the reader by summarising the argument or solution. Although relevant works by Barker and Bélis are listed in the bibliography, the applicable passages are rarely cited in the hundreds of footnotes, and there is a glaring absence of reference to Flora Levin, who was publishing a relevant book on Aristoxenus with Cambridge at the same time. Also, though many of his hypotheses rely upon the predominance of music performance and practice, he never addresses the scarcity of knowledge about actual performance. He implies that ancient Greek theoreticians, like many music theorists since Mersenne, were reacting in part to the tunings, intervals and modulations used by contemporary performance musicians. But only a handful of our theoretical sources mention contemporary practices, let alone discuss them in any detail.
None of this is to say that H.'s analyses, hypotheses, conclusions or demonstrations are implausible or incorrect as a result. H. has made a magnificent and enduring contribution to the study of ancient Greek music.
