In Numa's Time - Roman Song

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An original composition by Farya Faraji. The image is from the Etruscan Tomb of the Leopards. Many thanks to Luke Ranieri of the ScorpioMartianus channel for helping out with the Latin—make sure to check out both that channel and polýMATHY if you enjoy content about Ancient Rome and Greece.

This is my first attempt at a properly historically accurate reconstruction of Ancient Roman music. I chose to base this composition in the enharmonic modes of Ancient Greek music, mainly the Mixolydian enharmonic, with a small modification to one of the notes to make it even more microtonal. The enharmonic genus (category of mode) was the one defined by the usage of microtonality during and before the Hellenistic Era. Microtonality is any pitch found in between the space between tones and semitones (white and black key notes on a semitone); they are notes not found in Western European music, and therefore the sound of it can be extremey alien and out of tune to ears not from a tradition that uses them.

I purposefully leaned entirely into the microtonal aspect because I believe we can become complacent by only limiting ourselves to the Diatonic modes, the ones that sound like our modern Western European modes. Some scholars like Armand d’Angour espouse a view that the microtonal notes would have at most been passing notes that wouldn’t have been leaned into as pillars of the melody, and while I support this hypothesis as the most plausible given my own experience with Middle-Eastern music, where the microtonal notes are rarely the ones focused on and held long onto, I think we should be open to the possibility that the ancient, pre-Hellenistic Greek ear fully leaned into these frequencies and enjoyed these difficult-to-listen-to-notes.

Indeed, microtonality ended up becoming too difficuly even to the Hellenistic Greek ear, so that the genus ended up going out of use in that era. Therefore, the Romans of the Republic technically never used it as part of their musical system. They may have used it before, as Greek influence was widespread in Italy before and during the Hellenistic Era, but we have no data to back this up. In any case, my usage of the enharmonic mode here is thematic.

The lyrics are from Ovid’s Tristia; and in this specific passage I selected, he describes the long gone era of Numa Pompilius, the legendary second King of Rome. The Romans would have perceived the defunct, out of use enharmonic as a relic from olden times, and therefore I deemed it appropriate for expressing the sense of a time ancient even to Ovid’s; and it’s possible that Romans would have used enharmonic in extremely specific cases to express a concept of “old/ancient,” much like how Western operas may occasionally use scales unkown to Western Europe in order to express a sense of exoticism. This is why I chose an Etruscan image: though Numa himself was Sabine; Rome at the time lived in the shadow of the flourishing Etruscan civilisation, and many of its legendary kings were of that origin.

The orchestration uses the lyre, pandoura and aulos, as well as a frame-drum, all typical of the era. The lyrics are a modified and shortened version of the text found in Ovid’s Tristia, book 3, lines 29 to 30. I use Classical Latin pronunciation; the reconstructed pronunciation of Latin from the city of the Rome circa 100 B.C to 300 A.D, contemporary to Ovid’s time, and takes into account both vowel length and stress accent, although the elegiac metre of the original text was disregarded here.

Lyrics in Latin:
Hic locus Vestae est,
Qui servat pallada,
Haec fuit antīquī,
Rēgia parva Numae.

Hic stator hoc prīmum,
Condita Rōma loco est

English translation:
This is the place of Vesta,
That guards Pallas,
Here was once,
The tiny palace of Numa.

Here is Stator; here first,
On this spot, was Rome founded.