Epigonion: Greece musical instrument

An epigonion was an ancient stringed musical instrument that was mentioned in Athenaeus, perhaps a psaltery.

source of picture: www.itusozluk.com

The musical instrument was invented or at least introduced into the Greece world, by Epigonus of Ambracia, a greek musician of Ambracia in Epirus, who was admitted to citizenship at Sicyon as a recognition of his great musical gift and his having been the first to play the strings of the instrument with his bare hands, instead of using a plectrum. The version of the instrument that Epigonus named after himself was with forty strings.

Undoubtedly, it was a kind of harp or psaltery, since in a musical instrument of many strings some must have been of various lengths, for tension and thickness only could have hardly manufactured forty distinct sounds, or even twenty, assuming that they were arranged in pairs of unisons. Strings of different lengths need a frame like that of the harp of the Egyptian cithara that had one of the arms helping the cross bar or zugon shorter than the other, or else strings spread over the harp-shaped bridges on a soundboard in the case of a psaltery.

The king of Mauretania, Juba II, who reigned from 30BC, said that Epigonus brought the musical instrument from Alexandria and performed upon it with fingers of both hands, not only using it as an accompaniment musical instrument to the voice of the singer, but introducing chromatic passages and a chorus of some other stringed musical instruments, perhaps citharas, to accompany the voice of the singer. Epigonus was also a skilled player of the cithara and performed with his bare hands also.

In 2008, members of the ASTRA project used physical modeling synthesis to simulate the musical instrument. The musical instrument was simulated with the use of historical records and the audio from the instrument was rendered digitally. The 1^st audio rendering of the musical instrument that was released by the ASTRA, has duration of 30 seconds and it took about 4 hours to render. Because of the complexity of this process, the ASTRA project uses grid computing to model sounds of this instrument on hundreds of computers simultaneously.

The musical instrument is a part of the Lost Sound Orchestra, together with other old musical instruments that ASTRA have reconstructed their sounds, including the aulos, the salpinx, the barbiton and the syrinx.