The Music of Ancient Rome

A glance at the cover and a read through the story behind this release, with its tales of research into ancient notation, and you could be forgiven for thinking this may be an overly-academic exercise; which it is, but it’s also very enjoyable. The aim of the album is for it to be the first accurate collection of ancient Roman music, with Tedstone Glover leaving no stone uncovered in finding out how this music would have been played 2,000 years ago.

Instrumentally, she sticks to instruments that would have been used in ancient Roman street music, namely the tibia (a reed instrument), the pandoura (precursor to the banjo), and variants of the lyre, as well as percussion such as the rattling cup. Recorded live as a group, there is real energy in the pounding groove of ‘Bacchus’ with its echoes of Celtic or Galician music largely thanks to the tibia, its raspy tone the same as a fiddle. There’s real intrigue to the melody of ‘Saturnian’, which could easily have been a Shirley Collins discovery. The big surprise is that, even when there are Latin vocals courtesy of Papagena, this music does not feel disconnected to folk music that is still being played.