Dance of the Spartans - Ancient Greek Music

Music by Farya Faraji, based on melodic folk motifs from Greece. I was inspired to write an immersive piece of music as close as possible to historical practices of Ancient Greece—please keep in mind that this isn’t meant to be entirely historically accurate music from Ancient Greece, although it’s closer to realistic compared to some of my more creative pieces. The instruments are all from the soundscape of Ancient Greece: the aulos, the lyre, and a mantoura—the latter is a simple reed instrument from Crete, and such instruments are attested in Ancient Greece. I based this on motifs found across Crete, the Cyclades and Thrace, since they are the modern day regions that still use such reed instruments like in Ancient Greece, and therefore their sound is our best bet, in my opinion, at reverse-engineering the most probable usage of these instruments throughout the Greek world, given that they were ubiquitous throughout Greece back then. The melody is possible given what we know of the historical practice, with the usage of the Phrygian mode (what we call today the Dorian mode), although it’s not certain how folk melodies for dances were built, and whether they were ornamented in such a way especially before the Roman era, were ornamentation becomes more increasingly used. Most of the creative aspect on my part lies in two aspects: the strumming of the lyre to provide a constant drone constituted of the tonic and it’s lower perfect fourth—strumming was a major part of lyre...