Vīvāmus - Ancient Roman Song

Music and vocals by Farya Faraji, lyrics by Gaius Valerius Catullus. This another one of my attempts at conveying a historically accurate sound of what Ancient Roman music would have sounded like based on the known facts. In my opinion, the best place to start for reconstructing their music is the poetry: Ancient Roman poetry used the interplay of long vs short vowel lengths and stress accent to create rythmic effects to the poetry, not unlike modern rap does. This gives us a direct insight into some rythmic structures preserved by the phonemic quality of the language. Therefore, I based the structure of this song entirely on the recitation of the poem, and simply added musical notes to the pre-existing rythmic skeleton, using what they called the Phrygian Diatonic mode (which is the equivalent to today’s Dorian mode), and building the instrumentation around my reconstructed Greco-Roman lyre, frame drums, ancient cymbals, and a pan flute, all of which were in use back then. Knowing that poetry was