The Music of Classical Greece  

                                               Greece is considered to be the cradle of our European civilization.  We know that the classical Greeks valued music very highly.  Plato considered that music and gymnastics were the two essentials in education, though both these terms covered very much more than they do today.  But we do not really know what their music sounded like.  We know that they had various forms of scales, but the size of their intervals was not the same as ours, so that any attempt to reproduce their music sounds out of tune to us.  Men sang an octave below women and boys, just as they do today; but apart from that, their music was entirely melodic.  It was very much linked up with verse, as, for example, in the choruses to the Greek plays, which may have sounded rather like our modern choral speech.  Pipes and lyres often accompanied the voice, either in unison with the singer or on a drone.