Orfeo

'Prehistoric' approaches to ancient musics

In approaching music's distant past Cambridge
Music-archaeological Research takes as its starting point the
material record of archaeology: excavated finds of musical
and acoustic purpose or exploitation, together with all the
contextual evidence that can be gleaned from their
circumstances in the ground and their situation in the wider
landscape.

Such an approach represents an important break from established
historical approaches to ancient music. Historians and philologists of
many Old World musics have, very properly, emphasized their textual
dimension: exploring accounts of musical matters in the records of
ancient administrators and legislators, and interpreting descriptions of
music-making by writers and poets. Art historians have made musical
iconography their starting point: looking at the ancient images to see how
musical practices are represented there and change through time.
Ethnographers have surveyed modern musical behaviours in order to
model evolutionary processes that could have led to their emergence. In
so doing, each discipline has naturally sought to address its own
research questions; and understandably each has made use of such
evidence as archaeology has from time to time been able to contribute.
But with the expansion of archaeological exploration in the 1960s a new
idea began to emerge: that with excavation yielding more and more
musical finds it might be possible to envisage a new archaeology of
music, based in the material record: not of texts or images but of relics of
the behaviours themselves.

In Great Britain two prehistorians, Vincent Megaw and John Coles,
conducted some of the first truly archaeological studies in what might be
called music's prehistory. These treated ancient music as material
culture, within a framework derived from the discipline of Prehistory. The
approach quickly caught the imaginations of a new generation of
researchers. In Scandinavia graduate students Cajsa Lund and
Christian Reimers began a major survey of Swedish archaeological
collections, and a programme of archaeological experiment which was to
culminate in Cajsa Lund's now famous recording Fornnordiska Klanger:
The Sounds of Prehistoric Scandinavia (1984) - setting a benchmark for
future practical explorations of music's prehistory. In Cambridge two of
John Coles' research students, Peter Holmes and Graeme Lawson,
had also embarked on doctoral studies: Peter Holmes of European Bronze
Age horns and trumpets, and Graeme Lawson of ancient European
stringed instruments.

As these studies progressed it became apparent that 'musical prehistory' was
not only drawing upon prehistory for its own purposes but had, in its turn, new
things to say about prehistory. Indeed it became clear that such prehistoric
approaches could usefully be applied to the musics of recent times as well:
because the fine details of structure and context which archaeology preserves
afford viewpoints which the documents, however detailed, very often overlook
or may misrepresent.

From the start, therefore, this new, finds-based 'music archaeology' began to
take us in directions, and into territories, not previously travelled by more
conventional approaches. Unencumbered by dependence upon a population's
literacy or pictorial representation, it is capable of addressing not only prehistory
but remote periods of that prehistory. In Europe today the finds have already
taken us back almost to our species' first appearance here: indeed almost half
way back to its anatomical origins. And they do not just cast light on music's
origins: they reveal important aspects of music's evolution and the many strange
paths that it has taken across the millennia. The evidence itself is susceptible of
scientific analysis almost forensic in its scope and rigour. All the time our
databases are expanding. We can question them in ways that are closed to the
philologist or iconographer. These are not carefully worded eyewitness reports
but music's own 'silent witness': its fossil record. We can use microscopy and
technical analyses of different kinds to explore minute surface details and
material traces, and beneath the surface too. Trends in designs, whether of
instruments or sound-tools or architectural structures, inadvertently reveal to us
changes in the requirements - including musical requirements - which their
cultures had of them. We can look far beyond the behaviours which writers or
artists thought worthy of note. If a behaviour had a material expression, and if
by any quirk of taphonomy that expression may be capable of survival, there is
a chance for us to find it.

By such means 'music archaeology' is challenging, in a constructive way, many
of the conclusions reached by more established means. Discrepancies between
images and the realities they sought to represent are being actively explored.
Conflicts are emerging between some ancient philosophical writings on music
and the practices they purport to describe. Ancient tonal theories, previously our
sole evidence for tonal practice, appear increasingly as philosophical
abstractions or generalisations: true perhaps for a limited range of theoretically
based traditions but not necessarily true of musical behaviour at large. And
everywhere the new realities reveal themselves to be infinitely more varied and
complex than expected.

Today Cambridge Music-archaeological Research continues to advocate the
modelling of past musical behaviours, and music's long evolution, from within the
material record. Initiatives in music archaeological survey, science-based
music archaeology and music-archaeological conservation science are
described below.

cambridge music-archaeological research
<http://www.orfeo.co.uk>