Flavius’ Girl - 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. This poem, known to us as Catullus 6, is written in the Phalaecean Hendecasyllabic metre of eleven syllables, which musically, translates to a 9/8 time signature in a musical framework. Given the close proximity between poetry and music, and the lack of profound distinction between the two in the eyes of the ancients, we can be surmise these odd time signatures such as 9/8 would have been the norm for the Classical world. Therefo