Ces musiques du fond des ages: music from the earliest times

Harmonia Mundi's Century series is a highly ambitious and potentially very useful survey of 30 centuries of Western music included in several volumes. If the math on that does not quite work out for you, it should be qualified by saying that the literature is bereft of first-hand musical sources for the first 18 of those centuries. The first volume, La musique de l'Antiquité (Music of the Ancient World), represents attempts to reclaim the mostly lost musical heritage of the Ancient Greeks, Hebrews, and the pre-Roman church of Gaul. These are presented along with music from ancient times that have survived through tradition and some measure of primary sources - that of Byzantium and the Melkite Christians of Syria.Ancient Greece is represented in the reconstructions of Conrad Steinmann from his Harmonia Mundi album Melpomen. Steinmann decided to eschew the pathetic and widely ranging scraps of music that survive from Ancient Greece to build something up from scratch, utilizing rebuilt instruments.