# Classical music of jesus christ era?



## deprofundis (Apr 25, 2014)

Ockay tuff one , i Wonder if someone is musically knowledge enought to answer this one...
what were the music like in Jesus time, classical music that is.
Dose any Anonymous composer and composition remain like songs or whatever.
Short post but i Wonder??

:tiphat:


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Well, "Classical Music" as it's usually referred to did not exist in the 1st century. What we normally think of as the music encompassing Classical Music started during the period between the 8th and 12th century, roughly. Every culture has its own musical tradition though. If Jesus existed he probably would have heard a lot of Roman music since he would have lived in Roman-occupied Palestine. He probably would have heard Jewish traditional music and some other forms of various Middle Eastern music.

Unfortunately, because documentation was rarer and more difficult in those times, as well as events such as the destruction of the library of Alexandria and the various crusades and conquests that took place after the fall of Rome, notated music from back then is hard to find so it's difficult to know what it might have sounded like.

There are various fragments of music that scholars have found from ancient times and there are some music groups dedicated to piecing together these fragments for performing purposes.

Examples:














You can also look to world music traditions that survive today. They bare a close resemblance to the music that was probably played back then because the methods and theories have been preserved.


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## Guest (Jul 30, 2015)

I'm really not one much for hammering.

I misspent almost 20 years hammering the same few principles of writing into recalcitrant 18 year old minds. I misspent another 13 hammering the same principles into the writers at a computer software company.

And I don't even like hammering.

So if I ever come across in any posts anywhere as just a tiny bit impatient, it's very possibly because I'm a tiny bit impatient. Hamsters apparently enjoy those little wheels in their cages. Not being a hamster, myself, however....

Anyway, where's that old hammer of mine. Yes, here it is. You're a good hammer, a bit the worse for wear but not nearly as weary as I at my worst.

So here goes. Enjoy!

The term "classical music" is first of all, just that, a term. It has its own history, its own dates. It has had different content over the time of its existence, as well.

The term was coined--this is simply a matter of fact; there is nothing mysterious or controversial or even arguable about this; it's just a thing--in 1810, in Germany. It began to appear in England in the mid-1820s. I don't know about other countries.

I don't remember what all it contained at first. You can read about it for yourself in William Weber's _The Great Transformation of Musical Taste,_ which is my source for what I'm saying in this post. His sources are more, um, primary. As I recall, it was not nearly as encompassing as the term now is. The dates for what it included were certainly not set. Nor were the genres. In fact, people argued about everything for most of the century. Just like now, eh? As I recall, for example, songs were not classical music. A symphony was, but not a song. So Mendelssohn's symphonies were "classical music" but his Lieder were not. Nor was opera, which, be fair, was typically ingested in concerts in the form of arias. (Just like now, eh?)

You'll also have noticed, I'm sure, that the dates for the term do not coincide with the dates for what the term supposedly includes, including practically the entire era now called "classical."

Mozart and Haydn and Gluck and Beethoven. None of those guys wrote any classical music. They wrote a lot of nice music, but it was certainly not classical, not to them. The term didn't exist. So whatever they thought they were doing, it couldn't have been that. Only later, after they had written all their music (or, in Beethoven's case, most of it), was what they did called by this new name, "classical music." Only later did that era acquire the name "classical" to distinguish it from other eras. But not, I hasten to add, from the Baroque era. The Baroque era did not start being called "the Baroque era" until the early twentieth century, right around the time mm. Schoenberg and Stravinsky were supposedly ruining music for everyone and their dog. So yeah, Vivaldi and Telemann and Bach didn't write any Baroque music, not a note. How could they? Whatever it was they thought they were doing, it couldn't have been Baroque, that term not being applied to what they did until long after they were all quite dead.

So, the term was coined. It was an early salvo in the 19th century battle to change the idea that "new is better" into the new (!) idea that "old is better."

We know how that battle turned out.

So, the term was coined. It was pretty quickly retrofitted to all the "antient" music that was now becoming not only resuscitated, not only accepted as valid, but actively and aggressively presented and promoted as the ONLY valid music, new music being increasingly viewed with deep suspicion throughout the century. The 19th century. Before messieurs Arnold and Igor got to work on innovating all beauty and logic and sublimity from music. The idea of the canon arose out of this situation, and while the resistance to canonizing new music failed to keep _Carmen_ out of the canon and failed with _Rusalka_ as well, by World War II the canon was effectively closed.

Good riddance to a bad idea, I say. But that's just me.

So yeah, "classical music." It eventually came to include music from around the 8th century. It eventually came to include Schoenberg and Stravinsky, too, surprise surprise, as well as Varese and Cage and Lachenmann and Xenakis and the like, though those people were not as easily included in "the canon," which is a special place for special pieces and doesn't include great swathes of classical music. Great swathes of Beethoven, for that matter. Well, that's all arguable. At the industry marketing level of reality, there's not too much quibble about what "classical music" covers. There's less agreement about what's canonical.

If both of those concepts were to disappear overnight, say tonight, maybe--if we're lucky--everyone would continue happily writing whatever they write and listening to whatever they listen to, just like people in the time of Jesus Christ. He doesn't seem to have been a big music-lover, was he? Though that may just have been the disciples who did the write-ups. We only have as much about Jesus Christ as those guys were interested in. At least it was guys and not guy. I wonder what the Gospel of Mary Magdalene would have looked like....


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## Guest (Jul 30, 2015)

some guy said:


> He doesn't seem to have been a big music-lover, was he?


That'll be because the devil has all the good tunes.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

I would suggest by exploring the music of Roman times. Unfortunately not much is known relatively speaking of what the Romans played. But you get a good idea from the links below, both reading and of course the classical music itself. Pure and simple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_ancient_Rome


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

I have nothing to add to this discussion and just want to derail this thread and increase my post count.


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## Guest (Jul 30, 2015)

Dim7 said:


> I have nothing to add to this discussion and just want to derail this thread and increase my post count.


You want my software prog to do it for you?


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## Guest (Jul 30, 2015)

some guy said:


> I'm really not one much for hammering.
> 
> I misspent almost 20 years hammering the same few principles of writing into recalcitrant 18 year old minds. I misspent another 13 hammering the same principles into the writers at a computer software company.
> 
> ...


Words eh? You just can't rely on the buggers. You'll be telling me Cliff Richard is rock n roll next.


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

deprofundis said:


> Ockay tuff one , i Wonder if someone is musically knowledge enought to answer this one...
> what were the music like in Jesus time, classical music that is.
> Dose any Anonymous composer and composition remain like songs or whatever.
> Short post but i Wonder??
> ...


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Dim7 said:


> I have nothing to add to this discussion and just want to derail this thread and increase my post count.


Dvorak loved trains.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

The weird requests made by Deprofundis reminds me more and more of that Simpsons episode where Yoko Ono asks for "a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat" :lol:


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