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Unlocking the Riddles of Classical Greek Melodies II: The Revolution of the New Music in the Ashmolean Papyri (DAGM 5–6) and Athenaeus’ Paean (DAGM 20)


This article completes the discussion of the Classical/Hellenistic harmonic system set out in Lynch 2022a. Taken jointly, these articles offer the first account of the use of notation keys in the Hellenistic musical documents that is fully consistent with technical evidence as well as literary testimonies about the harmonic innovations of the New Musicians. This article offers practical analyses and new modern transcriptions of the Ashmolean Papyri (DAGM 5–6) and Athenaeus’ Paean (DAGM 20) – scores that reflect the modulation system of the New Music and its characteristic use of ‘exharmonic’ and ‘chromatic’ notes. The analyses offered in this article are powered by a newly-developed database (dDAGM) and show that these seemingly ‘exharmonic’ notes correspond to the chromatic ‘bends’ first identified in Lynch 2018a. These ‘bends’ (kampaí) ‘distorted’ the central pillars of the noble Dorian harmonía and turned it into its polar opposite: the Mixolydian, the emotional and lamenting mode par excellence.