Ancient Music in the Modern Classroom

The French musicologist Jacques Chailley devoted his professional career to the revival of medieval music and ancient theater and to the study of Greek music. Of his numerous publications, a book he originally penned in French in 1961 stands out for its powerful and sweeping title: 40,000 Years of Music. Yet, as is famously known, the book devotes only several paragraphs to the first 39,000 years of music, dedicating some 200 pages to music of the last millennium (Chailley 1975; Taruskin 2006: xxi). Chailley was neither the first nor the last musicologist to treat ancient music as part of a general music-history survey. Especially prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, the call to broaden the horizons of music history to include non-Western and ancient musics was met with eagerness by those who believed that until Western music was seen in the setting of universal history, its special position would not be understood properly (Wiora 1965: 9). To be fair, however, Chailley had good reasons to be as concise as he and others had been in treating ancient music. When Gustave Reese published his Music in the Middle Ages in 1940, the oldest example of musical notation available to scholars dated from 800 BCE; it employed cuneiform characters and was judged to be “definitely undecipherable” (Reese 1940: 6).