Singing Ancient Greek: A Guide to Musical Reconstruction and Performance
Abstract
This handbook, by a professional musician rather than a professional classicist, presents the basic facts about Greek pronunciation, rhythm, melody, and tunings and offers musical reconstructions of selected passages of ancient Greek poetry intended for modern performers.
About the author: A resident of his native Oregon, Douglas Leedy (b. 1938) is a composer, as well as a conductor specializing in early Western music; he has written extensively on tuning and intonation in musical theory and practice. He studied classical Indian singing with K. V. Narayanaswamy and Pandit Pran Nath; his Greek studies began at the University of California, Berkeley, under Elroy Bundy and Gerson Rabinowitz.
About this publication: the Department of Classics is pleased to host this suggestive work by a UC Berkeley alumnus. It has not proved practical to typeset the work, but it has been judged to be a useful addition to the literature on reconstructing Greek musical performance, presenting the unique perspective of a practicing musician and musicologist and thus complementing the efforts of classical scholars. It is therefore offered here as is, scanned from the typescript and manuscript pages.