Oldest notated music with a known composer

The Delphic Hymns are believed to have been written for a ritual procession – a “Pythaid” – performed by the Athenians to the sacred precinct of Delphi, in ancient Greece, in 128 BCE. Unlike the anonymous “Hymn to Nikkal”, the oldest written song with notation, which pre-dates the Delphic Hymns by circa 1,270 years, the composers of the “First Delphic Hymn” (singer Athenaeus, son of Athenaeus) and the “Second Delphic Hymn” (cithara player Limenius, son of Thoinos) have been identified. The monophonic (single melodic line) hymns are both addressed to Apollo, the Greek and Roman god of music (among other things), and were inscribed on stone fragments from an outer wall at the Athenian treasury building in Delphi, Greece, in 1893 by the French archaeologist Théophile Homolle.

The “First Delphic Hymn” is inscribed in vocal notation in three verses; the “Second Delphic Hymn” exhibits instrumental notation and comes in 10 sections. Both hymns are incomplete due to the fragmentation of the stones found on the treasury wall.

In June 1894, the “First Delphic Hymn” was performed in public for the first time at Sorbonne University, during an international convention organized to establish a framework for the modern Olympic Games under the auspices of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), founded by French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin and Greek businessman Demetrios Vikelas. On 6–15 April 1896, the Games of the I Olympiad were staged in Athens, Greece.