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The fourth category of evidence consists of non-literary documents, especially inscriptions, occasionally also papyri. These may record, for example, the hiring of musicians of some particular sort, the conferment of honours on some virtuoso, the establishment of musical subjects in a school curriculum, or the musical contests held at some festival and the prizes assigned to each. |
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The fifth category consists of actual musical scores. From at least the fourth century BC the Greeks had a system of notation, or rather two parallel systems, one used for vocal, the other for instrumental music. They were probably known to few outside specialist circles, but occasionally it was thought worth while, when the text of a song was displayed on an inscription, to furnish it with its notes, and in rather more cases we find papyrus fragments bearing notation. These usually seem to be remnants not of scores of some single continuous composition but of miscellanies of excerpts, perhaps to serve as items in some recitalist's programme, or as exercises or examples in a lesson. Exceptionally, a few specimens of ancient melody survived into a medieval manuscript tradition. Besides the instance of the Anonymus Bellermanni mentioned above, we have a coherent group of poems associated with the Cretan musician Mesomedes (early second century AD), the first four of which have managed to retain the melodic notation which originally seems to have adorned them all.11 |
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These four pieces, published by V. Galilei in 1581, were the only specimens of ancient music known until 1841, when they were joined by the Bellermann tunes. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the corpus began to expand. A little song carved on a tombstone, found in 1883, was followed by a papyrus fragment with some lines from a Euripidean chorus (1891) and by two more extensive -texts of paeans inscribed at Delphi (1893). Since then only a couple more inscriptions have turned up (1945, 1980), but papyrus fragments have accrued steadily (1918, 1922, 1931, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1965, 1966, 1973, 1976, 1986; publication of several others is in hand). We can reasonably hope for more in years to come. But it will be disappointing if they are all as wretchedly brief and lacunose as the ones we have. |
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11 Athanasius Kircher's claim in his Musurgia Universalis (Rome. 1650) to have discovered settings of the first few lines of Pindar's First Pythian Ode and of a verse and a half of Gregory Nazianzen in old MSS in a Sicilian monastery is no longer believed by anyone. On these and other unauthentic fragments see Pöhlmann. DA.M. 43-52. |
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