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My interest in the subject goes back to my second year as an undergraduate, when, browsing in J. U. Powell's corpus of fragments of Hellenistic verse, Collectanea Alexandrina, I was surprised to come upon several pages of music. They revealed themselves to be transcriptions of the two Delphic Paeans which are our most substantial specimens of ancient melody. I committed one of them to memory, and the next spring, when I went to Greece for the first time, on arriving at Delphi I sang it at the top of my voice in the ruins of the sanctuary where it had had its premiere 2,084 springs previously. My two travelling companions distanced themselves somewhat. A little later, as we examined the stone on which the text is inscribed, one of them stumbled against it, and it nearly crashed from its moorings and shattered. (I married her all the same.) |
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In the hope that the book may be of interest not only to classicists but also to musicologists, and indeed anyone with an interest in the history of music, I have tried to avoid allusions that might be unintelligible to one or the other group. There are bound to be mentions of ancient authors, places, and institutions that will be unfamiliar to non-classicists, but where I have left them unelucidated they should be inessential to the argument. Reference works such as The Oxford Classical Dictionary or Mrs M. Howatson's Oxford Companion to Classical Literature will assist in most cases. All quotations from ancient sources are given in translation, and any Greek words appear in transliteration. Almost no musical knowledge is presupposed. |
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I am indebted to Dr A. C. Baines, the former Curator of the Bate Collection of Historical Wind Instruments at Oxford, for encouragement and advice on various questions that arose in connection with Chapter 4; to Dr Günter Poethke of the Ägyptisches Museum in Berlin for important information concerning the musical papyrus that resides there; to Stephanie West for examining the same and answering a series of my queries about its text; to Professor W. G. Arnott, Professor Sir John Boardman, Professor J. N. Coldstream, Dr P. A. Hansen, Dr J. G. F. Hind, and Dr B. B. Rasmussen (Curator of Classical Antiquities in the National Museum of Denmark) for |
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