The music of the ancients

I believe in Ecclesiastes saying that “There is nothing new under the sun.” People say of video games that “This is new! It has never been done before!” But this seems unlikely. There is nothing new in Human nature. If there were, then art could not be art. It would have become obsolete along with everything else.

It seems particular to me that much ancient music does seem very similar to video game music. The differences is that most of the ancient music is far slower, certainly lacks the rock and roll vibe early video games had, and accompanies Latin, Greek, or Egyptian lines that tell a story. It is a story of the world broken, for some reason by the arrival of some sort of monster (who tends to throw the calendar, and time itself, in disarray),  where the young person must defeat the monster and put the order back in place. At the end, the person becomes a ‘hero’. And, of course, this is the plot of pretty much every video game ever made which raises my suspicions further.

This is All’ o Phoibe:

Maybe I am crazy. But for some reason, it strikes to me the same exact vibe. A vibe that is missing in non-video game music.

I ran that song by a programmer friend of mine. His reaction: “dig it so far. If it really is from ancient greece it appears they discovered psychedelic jazz before us, haha”

In this song, the music and the Latin are interwoven. When you translate these hymns and all, sometimes you’ll find offerings to the ‘gods’, but many of the time it is the tale of some hero (with the world starting off broken and the hero arises to fix it by slaying some monster).

This is the Delphic Paen.

It sounds just like a video-game to me. You could insert that song into a game and everyone would go, “What a cool video-game song!” It sounds like town music that would appear in a RPG.

Some might say the similarity is due only because of how few instruments are used. I’m not so sure about that.

When you go through the Muhabarata and begin reading about airships and battles on the moon, you know where Final Fantasy got that from (or from tales spinning off of that).

The Zelda series seems like a major culprit of this theory. Perhaps the best way to understand Zelda is to understand the Zelda fan (a feat which is equally scary and daunting). Zelda is unimaginable without its music. The die-hard Zelda fan might even tatoo the Triforce to his arm. You look in the past and you discover many Triforces. By that, I mean many geometric shapes appearing and re-appearing.

Anyway, it seems very clear to me that this is the creative cookie jar of the Old School whether developers intended this response or not.

Illic est nusquam novus sub sol solis. There is nothing new under the sun.