Seikilos Epitaph - Older Musical Compositions

Older Musical Compositions

There is a tradition of music notation older than the Greek system. A corpus of music fragments recorded on cuneiform tablets goes back to about 2000 BC. (See ancient music.)

Some scholars believe that an extant corpus of Chinese music, first recorded in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907), predates this work as well as the earlier fragments of Greek music. This is based on the conjecture that because the recorded examples of Chinese music are ceremonial, and the ceremonies in which they were employed are thought to have existed "perhaps more than one thousand years before Christ" (J. A. Van Aalst), the musical compositions themselves were performed, even in 1000 BC, in precisely the manner prescribed by the sources that were written down in the seventh century AD. (It is based on this conjecture that Van Aalst dates the "Entrance Hymn for the Emperor" to c. 1000 BC.) Even allowing for the hypothesis that the Emperor's court musicians transmitted these melodies with complete fidelity over sixteen centuries, there is no material evidence to date the composition, or any other piece of Chinese music, to earlier than the Tang dynasty (Pan). This leaves the Epitaph of Seikilos the oldest complete musical composition that can be reliably dated.