Thanks for the article, Sam. My undergraduate advisor in the U.C. Berkeley classics department (a quarter-century ago) was keenly interested in the performance aspects of Greek drama, including the music, and was active in several revival productions there:
http://www.classics.berkeley.edu/people/mark-griffith
I salute these sorts of efforts.
Is it churlish of me to wish that the singers involved in that videoed performance (in the article to which Sam linked) were
slightly better at listening to each other and producing a uniform blend while singing in unison? Probably. Oh, well, then, I'm churlish.
If folks here are interested,
Wikipedia's article on the Seikilos Epitaph features a recording of a delightful singer performing from ancient Greek musical notation, and approximating Koine pronunciation. If you're not familiar with the backstory of that particular inscription (on a funerary column), I'll just share this bit:
Quote:
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in about 1893, as it "was broken at the bottom, its base was sawn off straight so that it could stand and serve as a pedestal for Mrs Purser's flowerpots"; this caused the loss of one line of text, i.e., while the stele would now stand upright, the grinding had obliterated the last line of the inscription.
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