La musica dell'antica Roma Volume 2: Strumenti a corda

Ancient Mediterranean music refers to the vocal and instrumental practices of the civilisations that bordered the Mediterranean Sea in antiquity, chiefly Egypt, the Levant, the Greek world, and Rome. Because no continuous performance tradition survives, today’s practice is a historically informed reconstruction based on archaeology, iconography, ancient treatises, surviving musical notations, and re‑built instruments. The sound world is primarily modal and largely monophonic, often enhanced by drones, heterophony, or rhythmic ostinati. Singing was central and frequently syllabic, but could include ornamentation and microtonal inflection. Instruments such as the aulos (double‑reed), lyre and kithara (plucked chordophones), panpipes (syrinx), harps and lutes, frame drums and tambourines, sistrum, salpinx (trumpet), and early organs (hydraulis) created timbres ranging from nasal and reedy to bright and metallic. Music functioned in ritual, theatre, processions, banquets, athletic festivals, funerary rites, and domestic entertainment. Its aesthetics emphasised ethos—the moral and affective power of modes and rhythms—and closely intertwined poetry, dance, and music.

Ancient music refers to the musical practices of the literate civilizations of antiquity (e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Levant, Persia, India, and China) before the medieval period. It is largely monophonic, text-driven, and modal, and survives today through a small corpus of notated fragments, theoretical treatises, iconography, and instrument remains. Its sound world is characterized by modal pitch systems (e.g., ancient Greek harmoniai built from tetrachords), rhythm tied to poetic meter, and timbres from lyres, harps, auloi (double-reed pipes), flutes, rattles/sistra, frame drums, and early lutes. Because authentic performance practice must be reconstructed, modern revivals rely on scholarship in archaeology, philology, and organology as much as on musical craft.

Ancient Roman music refers to the musical practices of the Roman Republic and Empire, roughly from the early centuries BCE through Late Antiquity. It was largely monophonic and orally transmitted, used in civic ritual, theater, private banquets, military life, and religious cults. Its core sound world combined Greco-Roman string and wind instruments (cithara, lyre, tibia/aulos) with percussion (tympanum, cymbala, crotala, sistrum) and powerful brass (tuba, cornu, bucina). The hydraulis (water organ) added a distinctive timbre to spectacles. Rhythm often followed poetic meters, and performance likely favored heterophonic textures and ornamented melodic lines over harmonic progressions. Rather than a single unified style, Roman music was a mosaic: theatrical and dance music for the ludi, refined kithara- and lyre-centered song for elite salons, processional and cultic soundscapes (including Egyptian-Isiac elements), and martial brass for command and ceremony.