Aulos
Ancient Greek reed instrument, usually played as a pair of pipes.
What it means
The aulos is a reed instrument of ancient Greece, usually consisting of two separate pipes that a single player blew at the same time, one with each hand. Despite the traditional English rendering "flute," the sound is not produced by blowing across an edge but through a reed at the mouthpiece, much as with an oboe or clarinet.
Musical use
In ancient Greece the aulos accompanied almost every musical occasion: sacrifices, athletic contests, drinking parties, and above all the choral songs of Athenian tragedy and comedy. The player, called an auletes, often wore a leather strap around the cheeks and back of the head that supported the cheeks during forceful blowing.
Its piercing sound, often described as unsettling, made the aulos the counterpart to the kithara: while the plucked kithara, with its measured tone, was associated with the composed god Apollo, the aulos was seen as the instrument of the ecstatic cult of Dionysus.
The aulos should be distinguished from the modern transverse flute or recorder, with which it shares nothing in terms of sound production despite the occasional translation "flute," and from the tibia, the Latin name for the same instrument in Roman times.
Performance practice
Modern reconstructions of the aulos, based on archaeological finds, often reveal a microtonal tuning that departs from today's semitone scale; transcriptions for modern instruments can therefore only approximate these subtleties.