Antiquis Musica Romanum

AFAIK thier is no surviving record of musical notation from Ancient Rome. Its remotely possible that a few pieces may have survived the devastation of the dark ages which may be present in later periods of European culture. Your best avenue for enlightenment here is Europe in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods.

Bands like Synaulia and Musica Romana utilize the ancient instruments to create modern pieces. They are not ancient musical pieces.

Along with the ways we use music today, music in antiquity and up to the modern day was utilized by the military to incite and to communicate with soldiers. They did not have radios they sounded a language via horns or trumpets and also the marching band played pieces to psyche up the soldiers. That same feeling of being psyched was also used by religion to invoke gods. This meant repetition until trance. The Ancient Athenians closely enjoyed the arts with religious ordinances and it is well known that they developed an intimate knowledge of themselves. Today we would say that media that incites us is still ourselves and not gods coming forth, nor would we say that of effects displayed in the outer world.

Sadly the corpus of ancient music is short. Recorded music begins with the Athenians. Prior claims are very imaginative.

The earliest fragment of musical notation is found on a 4,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablet (1400 BC), which includes instructions and tunings for a hymn honoring the ruler Lipit-Ishtar. But for the title of oldest extant song, most historians point to “Hurrian Hymn No. 6,” an ode to the goddess Nikkal that was composed in cuneiform by the ancient Hurrians sometime around the 14th century B.C. The clay tablets containing the tune were excavated in the 1950s from the ruins of the city of Ugarit in Syria. Along with a near-complete set of musical notations, they also include specific instructions for how to play the song on a type of nine-stringed lyre.

“Hurrian Hymn No. 6” is considered the world’s earliest melody, but the oldest musical composition to have survived in its entirety is a first century A.D. Greek tune known as the “Seikilos Epitaph.”

The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. 1st Century AD. An inscription on a pair of gravestone columns discovered in Turkey and now residing in the National Museum of Denmark. The inscription begins, “I am a tombstone, an image. Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless remembrance” (qtd. in Bond 5). The song itself follows:

Ho-son dzes pahi-nou, [As long as you live, be happy;]

me-den ho-los sy ly-pou. [do not grieve at all.]

Pros o-li-gon es-ti to dzen, [Life's span is short;]

to te-los ho chro-nos ap-ai-tei. [time exacts the final reckoning.]

Hieroglyphs between the lines of text indicate melody and even the length of the pitches. The tune is exotic sounding and effectively catchy. Technically, it's Phrygian, “equivalent to the D-octave on the white keys of a piano” (Pilasca 2), with prominence given to the mese or central note, a. Although the owner of the columns some time between 1883 and 1922 removed a slice from the bottom of one to make the two even, an earlier scholar had made a rubbing of the entire inscription.

The Delphic Hymns are two musical compositions from Ancient Greece, which survive in substantial fragments. Dated circa 138 BC and 128 BC, Unfortunately, both songs are incomplete, but musicologists have done their best to piece together the fragments. Several modern recordings of both hymns exist.

3 complete hymns (2nd century AD) exist in manuscript.

(a total of 15 poems by Mesomedes are known)