Talk:Ancient Greek Musical Notation

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Proposition to include uses and link to article on Musical system of Ancient Greece
This article has limited useful information for people who use this Unicode for Ancient Greek Music Notation and is focused on the history of writing the Unicode. While coders and programmers may find this fascinating, readers studying Ancient Greek music will find a dearth of information on how this Unicode is used to digitally transcribe works of Ancient Greek music or write new music in the style of the Ancient Greeks. I propose additional text to relate this article to the Wikipedia article “Musical system of Ancient Greece”. AttempingUpright (talk) 21:28, 20 January 2023 (UTC)


 * It seems reasonable to include information about the practical use of the Ancient Greek Musical Notation block characters in this article. I'm guessing you mean the technical aspects of using them and not more general notation information that could go in the Musical system of ancient Greece article. I'm not familiar with their use so I don't know if they're just plain text or a more complicated system like MathML is for mathematics.  If the new information grows enough to overshadow the block information, it can always be split into its own article.  DRMcCreedy (talk) 16:44, 21 January 2023 (UTC)


 * In a partial answer to AttempingUpright's question: You can find some descriptions of how to use the symbols in M.L. West (1992) Ancient Greek Music. He's my main source, but unfortunately now-days I'm working mostly from memory. Basically, both the vocalists' musical notes and the instrumentalists notes were written along a half-line above the lyric text, like a super-superscript. I don't know whose notes were on the top of the over-line and whose were on the bottom, but it seems like the two sets of notes were different enough that nobody was confused by the occasional duplicate symbols (the duplicated symbols were used for different pitches, so that must have helped). The singers' note symbol is always-always placed over top of the first vowel that the note is sung on. Same story with the instrumentalist, but their notes can also be inserted above in the space before the word, if the instrumentalist was supposed to come in before the singing or recitation starts. The musical rhythm & beat was taken from the vowels in the text and the naturally occurring accents that occurred in the language. Part of your challenge in writing in ancient Greek style is training people to follow the rhythm of the words and not to pound on the melody's beat. I think it's kind of like Gregorian chant, where it's deliberately paced and has emphasis exactly like natural speech, and avoids thumping on some fixed rhythm pattern. I think that it was only the music for comical actors, and for a comedy's chorus, where the music tended to be thumpy. The high-class dramatic parts were (usually) in a more flowing, speech-like rhythm that went with the words, not with a melody's rhythm – or rather, the dramatic parts' melodys' rhythms were bent and stretched and chopped so that the music's beat adapted to match the words delivered in the lyrics as naturally as possible. People have looked at it very intensely, but there is no reasonable indication that the Byzantine-era pitch accent marks that we see in modern editions of Greek text had anything to do with musical pitch, or tonal accents in ancient or Classical or Helenistic Greek, but regardless of tonal accent (or not tonal), the accented letters did occur on the beat. In the absence of an accent, the "long" vowels ($α υ ω$) were on beat. Short-vowel, unaccented syllables ($ε ι ο$) could go anywhere: Usually off the beat, but could also be filler on the beat when the lyrics were missing an accented vowel or long syllable in a necessary spot. To break with a melody's established rhythm, or modify the pronunciation to conform to it, there are three or four metrical marks (like the 5-beat mark  𝉄) at the end of the ancient Greek music block; they're combining characters so they can be stuck on the affected vowel. (Some) non-combining versions listed under the same names are in the bottom 00xxyy unicode page. Apparently they were used when the line-up of the musical beat with the lyrics was tricky, or needed to bunch several syllables on a single beat. I'm really not too clear on exactly what they mean, musically, in the marked text; I think that the same mark might have been used several (slightly?) different ways, and it was up to the reader to figure out what to do. They remind me of modern triplet marks or even pentuplet marks that pop ups as surprises in notated music that follows song lyrics in modern music. I think that these rhythm marks were only used on the rare occasions: Spots where the lyrics' natural rhythm had to give way to the established beat of the melody, or when there was some intricate trick for distributing hard beats onto a string of "no beat" syllables, or vice versa, and of course for doubling-up two (or several) syllables on one beat. For all I know, there were never any dynamic marks, and no tempo: Everything was supposed to come from intuition about the meaning of the lyrics, the emotional state of the drama, and the form / natural speed of the melody. Apparently there were no notated chords, per se, but the vocalists did sing different notes than the instrumentalists were playing, so they at least had some kind of counterpoint going: It was not just all unison (although that seems to have happened a lot). 166.199.8.58 (talk) 08:46, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Article needs to explain what to do about the missing note symbols
One of the things that is missing from the Unicode character block's notes is instructions on what to use for the notes that have been left out: The block description very specifically writes that the the music symbols have deliberately omitted note sybols that are identical to plain (capital) Greek letters, but it doesn't have a short list at the end to give the Attic Greek alphabet block letters that substitute for the missing note symbols. The instrumental notes that are skipped because they're the same as one of the symbols in the vocalists' notes are fine: The description in the vocalists' notes very clearly explains both the symbols' uses as vocal notes and as instrumental notes, including their scholars' instrumental note ID number, and the standard / conventional pitch. So no problem for those.

I do find that it's possible to sort-of guess my way through what the missing letter probably is: The omissions are (all?) instrumental notes, and the blank spots where the missing notes belong show up when the scholars' ID number given in the description skips a number. So the missing scholar number = an omitted note, so in that way it is clear from the Unicode character descriptions where the missing note should be, just not what it is, unless it's a symbol duplicated in the vocalists' notes (this skipped number is the scholars' ID number given in sequence, with holes, in the descriptive notes for each symbol / Unicode character in the block, it is not the Unicode character number).

Having the instrumental note ID and pitch incorporated in the vocalists' notes works: Those actually fill in a lot of the missing notes. There are only something like half a dozen missing notes left unaccounted for. Since the Unicode block's introduction section clearly warns that the character set has been pruned, and that notes that duplicate Attic Greek alphabet letters have been left out of the list, I assume that the remaining half dozen or so missing notes must be those. But which are the right Attic Greek letters for the blank spots?

Most of the remaining dropped notes are in the higher pitches, where the instrumentalist notes start to get systematic. They come in triples: Three versions of one letter (although not always an Attic letter). Some of the triples are one left tilted, one right tilted, and one that's normal; other triples are one that's mirror reversed, another that's upside down, and and one that's normal, etc. From the shapes of the tilted and mirror-reversed figures, it's pretty easy to recognize the Attic Greek letter that they were based on, but guessing like that seems prone to error. I'm leery of using "looks like" to fill in the holes, mainly because other parts of the instrumental note sequence also look vaguely systematic, but those systematic multiplets have frequent odd-ball notes / letters / symbols that show up in a spot where they don't even slightly resemble the adjacent notes which look like they're proceeding systematically, and as far as I can tell there is no sensible order to the choice of notes; no master plan to suss out.

I've been searching online for some authoritative list of the ancient Greek notation, both to check against (there are occasional errors in the Unicode descriptions, mostly the occasional mix-up of a left-handed vs. right handed version of a letter) and also to get the substitutes Greek letters that should fill in the missing instrumental pitch symbols, but haven't found one online yet. There is a nice chart in the back of M.L. West's (1992) Ancient Greek Music but alas: My copy of is in a box buried under other book boxes, deep in a storage locker in another state, guarded by a sleeping dragon. 166.199.8.58 (talk) 08:46, 24 March 2024 (UTC)