MUSIC OF ANCIENT GREECE
Director: Bernard George
Author: Bernard George
Executive Producer: O2B Films
Broadcaster: ARTE France • Cosmote TV
Release year: 2021
Running time: 53 minutes
International sales: ARTE Distribution
Recently, a papyrus was discovered in the Louvre Museum basement. It is a barely readable text, topped with tiny strange characters.
The research lead by the archeomusicologist Annie Bélis revealed that it is a very ancient score of Greek music, and more specifically of a tragedy, the Medea. A grammatical specificity of the text enabled to identify the composer, Carcinus, an author mentioned by Aristotle in his Poetics, in which the philosophe and preceptor of Alexander the Great quotes a few verses of this tragedy.
Discovering little by little Carcinus’ life, whose name is carved on a wall of the Parthenon, it is a whole world opening to us: the one of Greek musicians honoured as Gods and who were travelling along the Mediterranean Sea to take part in competitions modelled on the Olympic Games.
But how to decrypt the music of the Medea? A medieval manuscript describing the ancient Greek musical notation system, the Tables of Alypius, will turn out to be a true "Rosetta Stone".
But to listen to the Medea as it was listened to by the Greeks 2 400 years ago, it has to be played with the music instruments used by then. From Greek city-states of Anatolia to the Egypt of the Ptolemies, from mythic site of Delph to discoveries made at Pompei, we will go all around the Mediterranean Sea, where the archeologic digs delivered antique music sheets and a lot of instruments remains.
It is during a concert, given in the prestigious ancient theatre of Arles, that we will give to listen to the public an acoustic world thought to have disappeared forever: the Medea of Carcinus, the music of Greek antiquity.
