FIG. 1-9 Harpist in the garden of Sennacherib, shown in a neo-Assyrian bas-relief from the palace at Niniveh, seventh century
B.C.E., 500 years later than the earliest musical notation, of similar geographical provenance, to have been successfully
transcribed in modern times. That piece, described in the text, could have been performed by one or both of the figures
represented here.
EX. 1-10 First phrase of Hurrian cult song from ancient Ugarit, transcribed by Anne Draffkorn KilmerPretty much the same may be said about the handful of ancient (if relatively “late”) Greek melodies
that happen to survive in decipherable practical sources, as well as the earliest Greek Christian music
that grew more or less directly out of prior pagan practice.^12 The earliest such Greek remnant, the first of
two surviving Delphic Hymns, or paeans to Apollo sung by a priestess at the Delphic oracle’s abode, was
set down around 130 BCE on a now only partly legible stone tablet that is kept at the National
Archaeological Museum in Delphi. It employs a learned and artificial style, called the “chromatic [i.e.,
colorful] genus” by the Greeks, in which some of the strings of the lyre were tuned low in order to
provide two semitones in direct succession. (Hence the adaptation of the word “chromatic” to denote the
much later Western practice of inflecting scale degrees by semitones; Greek theorists also describe an
“enharmonic” genus in which the semitones could be replaced by quarter tones.) Ex. 1-11a shows the
second half of the melody, in which the embellishing “chromatic semitones” are most prevalent, adapted
from a somewhat speculative transcription made about eighty years ago by the French archaeologist
Théodore Reinach: it reproduces the melodic pitches exactly as “alphabetically” notated in the source but
infers the meter and rhythm from that of the text.