Ancient Babylonian Music

For me it hovers just on the edge of comprehensibility, like a language heard and recognized by not understood (as Arabic is for me now), or one learned and mostly forgotten (like the ones I learned studying Angevin England.)

It makes sense that it would be concert music. Music for formal purposes such as ritual or Court would be what has a formalized written theory. Folk music grows without such constraints. The music theorists, if they don't dismiss it as rude, crude and socially unacceptable, try to find structure in it after the fact. So I'm not surprised that what this performer can reconstruct is the formal form - there's a good chance that either no one bothered to write it down, or that (since what we have preserved probably came from the royal archives) it wasn't in a place where it would be preserved.