Seikilos epitaph
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The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The song, the melody of which is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone, near Aidin, Turkey (not far from Ephesus). Also on the tombstone is an indication that states:
- I am a tombstone, an icon. Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless remembrance.
Above the lyrics (transcribed here in modern Greek font) is a line with letters and signs for the tune:
Translated into modern musical notation, the tune is something like this:
The following is a transliteration of the words which are sung to the melody, and an English translation:
- Hoson zis, phenou
- Miden holos su lupou
- Pros oligon esti to zn
- To telos ho chronos apeti
- The phonetic transliteration shown here is based on the phonology of New Testament Greek as described by Friedrich Blass and Albert Debrunner, and Robert W. Funk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).
- As long as you live, be lighthearted.
- Let nothing trouble you.
- Life is only too short,
- And time takes its toll
The find has been dated variously from around 200 BC to around AD 100. While older music with notation exists (for example the Delphic Hymns), all of it is in fragments; the Seikilos epitaph is unique in that it is a complete, though short, composition.
There is a tradition of music notation older than the Greek system. A corpus of music fragments recorded on cuneiform tablets goes back to about 2000 B.C. See ancient music.
Some scholars believe that an extant corpus of Chinese music, first recorded in the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), predates this work as well as the earlier fragments of Greek music. This is based on the conjecture that because the recorded examples of Chinese music are ceremonial, and the ceremonies in which they were employed are thought to have existed "perhaps more than one thousand years before Christ" (J. A. Van Aalst), the musical compositions themselves are likely to have been performed, even in 1000 BC, in precisely the manner prescribed by the sources that were written down in the seventh century AD. It is based on this conjecture that Van Aalst dates the "Entrance Hymn for the Emperor" to c. 1000 BC. Even allowing for the hypothesis that the Emperor's court musicians transmitted these melodies with complete fidelity over sixteen centuries and that the Chinese court ceremonies never changed, there is no material evidence to date the composition, or any other piece of Chinese music, to earlier than the Tang dynasty (Pan). This leaves the Epitaph of Seikilos the oldest complete musical composition that can be reliably dated. It is the inscription of the Epitaph that is actually dated to the first century AD; it would be possible likewise to form a conjecture that the song itself was sung before this.
A basic rendition of the song, using Koine Greek pronunciation, can be found below.
Media:Ο Επιτάφιος του Σεῖκιλου - Epitaph of Seikilos.ogg
[edit] References
- Historical Anthology of Music. Two volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1949. ISBN 0-674-39300-7
- Chinese Music. J.A. van Aalst, 1884, 1933.
- Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980.
- China. Rulan Chao Pan, 1980.
- Norton Anthology of Western Music: Ancient to Baroque. Volume one. New York, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. ISBN 0-393-97990-3
- Epitaph of Seikilos. C. V. Palisca, J. P Burkholder, 2006.
