The Seikilos epitaph, carved on a funerary stele from
Haydin in Turkey, kept in the National Museum of
Copenhagen, is the oldest musical score that has come
to us intact. There are more ancient ones (here we
published the Hurrian Hymn No. 6, dated about 1400 BC),
but they are not complete, or they don’t contain a
melody that can be reconstructed with sufficient
certainty. Here instead, thanks to the use of the
letters of the Greek alphabet, according to the scheme
- taken from Wikipedia - repr...(+)
The Seikilos epitaph, carved on a funerary stele from
Haydin in Turkey, kept in the National Museum of
Copenhagen, is the oldest musical score that has come
to us intact. There are more ancient ones (here we
published the Hurrian Hymn No. 6, dated about 1400 BC),
but they are not complete, or they don’t contain a
melody that can be reconstructed with sufficient
certainty. Here instead, thanks to the use of the
letters of the Greek alphabet, according to the scheme
- taken from Wikipedia - reproduced above the title, it
is possible to reconstruct the degrees of the Greek
scale (formed by two equivalent tetrachords, like our
major scale), as well as the accents and the duration
of the notes. The tonality is not indicated, and
neither is the indication of time. In current
transcriptions, ternary times are usually proposed; we
however, considered the funeral destination of the
melody, preferred to adopt a binary one.
SHEET MUSIC