Orfeo

Cambridge Music-archaeological
Research exists to conduct and promote
advanced finds- and site- based studies in the
new archaeologies of music and sound.

Unlike longer-established interpretive approaches to
ancient musics (for example those of philology, art
history, ethnography, musicology and dance studies)
archaeology has been slow to appreciate its acoustical
assets, and slow therefore to bring to their study the
benefits of its own particular perspectives and terms of
reference. Cambridge Music-archaeological Research
seeks to remedy this from within archaeology, aiming to
demonstrate the aptness of such behaviours to
archaeological exploration and their fitness as subjects
into which the archaeology student may profitably invest
his or her time and energies.

CMAR aims to dispel the myths that music- and sound-related
materials are rare and somehow alien parts of the fossil record, and
that they remain fundamentally inscrutable 'because we do not
have any music'. It aims to show the relevance of the finds not just
to mainstream music studies but to a whole range of current
archaeological preoccupations. It identifies the essentially
archaeological character of the material and of the processes of
excavation and survey which generate it. It sees a consequent -
and imperative - need for archaeological process in its
interpretation. Thus the origins and evolution of acoustic behaviours
- including music - come to appear first and foremost as
archaeological challenges, and the finds and their contexts as
material culture.

Viewed in this way music's archaeological evidence ceases to
appear marginal to archaeology, a mere sequence of fortuitous,
random survivals which may occasionally allow us to validate
theories emerging from other disciplines: it emerges in its own right
as a basis for systematic, interpretive modelling. Such approaches,
CMAR believes, are going to be fundamental to the long-term future
of ancient musical and sound-use studies: both essential to a
proper understanding of the evidence and vital to the very
preservation of that evidence, whether extant or yet to be
discovered. Musical and acoustic finds become the fingerprints and
DNA of our detective work, their archaeological contexts our
scenes of crimes. Their first-hand testimony offers us direct
glimpses into music's ancient past.

CMAR strongly advocates the study and teaching of acoustic
behaviours within higher education's archaeological curriculum,
especially within the disciplines of prehistory and archaeological
science.

Whilst this naturally renders it initially a matter of scientific analysis, it also offers
through replicative experiment new and exciting ways of approaching the
sounds - and musics - themselves. Ergonometry of designs offers unique
insights into performance techniques and the technical needs of the musics
they served; acoustimetry of forms affords access to textural and tonal
preferences, including tuning behaviours; studies of design and the changes
designs express through time offer insights into the evolution of musical
practice. The finds exhibit technological complexity too. Indeed it seems that
music is often a driving force in technological change. But most powerfully of all
they reveal the evolution of some of the most complex of all human behaviours:
the acoustic constituents of communication, of social memory and of tradition.

Graeme Lawson writes:
'Too often in archaeology we seem to see music's fossil
record as 'something other', to be left to other disciplines
to make sense of. In reality it's no less archaeological
than any of the other things we do: agrigulture or
economy or demography or technology - or art. Indeed
sound and music are at the very heart of the
'anatomically modern' human experience. Their ancient
material traces have already yielded some big surprises -
and we have still hardly begun to scratch the surface'.