Patrick, A person who may have information on this would be Leonard Benson, whose email address is:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] He is a retired art history professor who has studied different facets of the ancient world from information from Rudolf Steiner. Steiner was a philosopher, an educator, and a cultural leader in Switzerland and Germany from 1900 to 1925. He edited Goethe's scientific works in Weimar before embarking on his peripatetic career involving educating the public through some 6,000 lectures about the spiritual world and its inter-connections with man. He said of himself that he had highly developed conscious clairvoyant vision, which allowed him to see accurately into the past and thereby to get information not open to those without it. He is what is termed an initiate, and he said that Virgil had been trained in the initiate-mystery tradition. This is what could have him know c. 40 BC that the cultural epochs, the precessional ages of 2160 years, were about to turn from that of Aries the ram to Pisces the fish - "Iam redit et Virgo" - Virgo is in the same polarity as Pisces the fish, hence the meaning of his statement. If you ask Leonard Benson about ancient music, please tell him that Larry Ely sent you. He only checks his email every few days. If he cannot help you, he likely can refer you to someone who can. Larry Ely, Demeter Institute, Amherst, MA At 12:33 PM 3/14/03 -0000, you wrote: >> I don't think anyone has yet answered this query, or if they did so I >> missed it. And, sorry, I have no real information to offer. All I remember >> is hearing a classics lecturer telling my librarianship students that our >> knowledge of the ancient world is a patchwork of light and dark, and that >> music, unfortunately, is "a dark area". > >Simon, > >Thanks for your reply on this. I too remember some Latin master in my dim >and distant school days telling me that no one knew what Classical Roman (or >Greek) music sounded like. But scholarship has moved on and I wondered if >anyone had any inkling now of what it might have been like. Did the Roman >shepherds on their reeds and straws sound like a skillful Irish musician or >South African kwelo player on a simple six-holed pipe? There must too, have >been world-class musicians in Virgil's day who, musically speaking, were the >equivalent of some of the great Roman writers. I am sure they did a bit >more than compose for 'oaten pipes'. > >It is just that I would like to get some sort of mental picture of what sort >of sound Amaryllis, for example, in Eclogue I might have been hearing. > >Patrick Roper > > >----------------------------------------------------------------------- >To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. >Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message >"unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You >can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
