Day 75 (11/8 - Sun)

Tonight I was up late in the office doing research for a new course I'm teaching next spring semester entitled -- Sacred Songs: History of Greek Hymns. I was planning on teaching it anyway, but with the creation of the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies, my new course will be cross-listed with that program, and I'm in general very excited about the whole thing. Music! Poetry! Pagan gods! Jesus! Cross-cultural linguistic baggage and religious negotiation! What isn't there to love? The general idea is to spend the first half of the course looking at pre-Christian Greek hymns and spend the second half looking at the early Greek hymns of the Christian church, with an eye toward continuities and differences between the two sets of hymnic material. Can't wait!

In the course of my research on ancient music in general, one important song that pops up is the the Seikilos Stele, a tomb inscription that is famous for including not only a fun little song that passersby are supposed to sing but also the actual musical notation so that people will know what notes to sing! The inscription has been dated from anywhere around 200 BC - AD 100, but anywhere in that period makes this the oldest song with intact (non-fragmentary) original musical notation anywhere in the world! Here is a drawing of the inscription:



Crazy, eh? I LOVE Greek (and Latin)! The musical notations are the weird tiny symbols above the various words in the song (the 6 lines of text that have symbols above them). Check out this link for an explanation and a pretty sweet modern recording of the song!

I love my job!