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Greek Music Research Paper

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Music has been around some millennia. Every known civilization has had its own sort of music, the human voice even being as old as the species itself. “The earliest indisputable musical instrument—a kind of flute made from the wing of a vulture—dates back to 34,000 B.C.E.” Many musical concepts that are used today in Western music come from the works of the ancient Greeks. We owe many of the terms coined for music to the Greeks, such as the word music derived from the Greek term mousike, meaning “the art of the Muses” or melos, which has evolved to form the English world melody. Music played a significant role in the life of your average Greek person, you would hear music everywhere. Music was used in feasts and public festivals, where there might have been be choruses, singing and sometimes even dancing around a ceremonial altar. Music was also used during more intimate ceremonies, like weddings and funerals. One of the most important venues for music in ancient Greece was the …show more content…

Philosophers such as Boethius, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and Socrates were very important to the development of music. Pythagoras is credited to having discovered the rations between certain intervals: the octave (2:1), the fifth (3:2) and the fourth (4:3), just by having walked by a blacksmiths shop and noticing the difference and beauty in sound when multiple hammers hit the anvil. He was so curious was to what made these intervals sound harmonious, he realized that the difference in the weight of the hammer is what caused these intervals to sound that way, because they were simple ratios of each other, therefore they were called “perfect” intervals. To Pythagoras, music was the mathematical basis of sound, a law which fundamentally governed the relationship of all physical bodies and the

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