Orfeo

History of an emerging science

Like any emerging field of research, music's archaeology has for a long time been
the preserve of the individual pioneer.

Today, even as such individual efforts start to merge into coherent academic and scientific
subdisciplines, the role of the individual still remains important, and indeed the pioneering origins
themselves are becoming a subject of interest in their own right. From the first tentative discourse
between antiquarians and music-historians in the late 18th century the trail can be followed
through the dramatic discoveries of the 19th century to the engagement of modern ethnographers,
iconographers, philologists and prehistorians within living memory. Believing that an awareness of
its own origins is a healthy - indeed necessary - attribute of any field, CMAR is now initiating a
first in-depth review of the achievements of those formative days.

Musical texts, images and finds have fascinated scholars ever since the earliest modern
antiquarian investigations of the eighteenth century. At first it was the texts and images which
predominated; but as time went by material finds began to prove especially thought-provoking.
Instruments of Ancient Greece, Rome and the Bible Lands attracted most attention, alongside those
recovered from the tombs of Pharaonic Egypt. But prehistoric forms also made an early
appearance, notably in Ireland and Scandinavia. Thus already in the 18th century music-historians
such as Charles Burney were beginning to acknowledge their value, a process which gathered
pace in the 19th century until, as the 20th century opens, we enter the modern ethnohistorical age
of Otto Andersson, Francis Galpin, Curt Sachs, Friedrich Behn and Hans Hickmann (to
name only a few); and in the 1950s we see a new generation of archaeologists beginning to turn
their attention to music.

The intended first outcome of this initiative is a biographical survey of music archaeology's varied
origins, comprising studies of both the people who began the processes and some of the materials
which came to shape their thinking.

Cold case review programme

As part of its commitment to the fullest possible exploration of music's finds
record, CMAR undertakes cold case reviews of documented finds from 19th-
century and earlier antiquarian investigations: where either the finds themselves
have since disappeared or their contexts seem inadequately reported.

Such reviews are especially beneficial in the case of finds for which parallels remain few or even
non-existent. Amongst the subjects currently under review are the lost neck of a medieval harp
from County Antrim in Northern Ireland, so far still unparalleled, and a completely preserved early
medieval lyre from the Swabian Jura of Southern Germany which is believed to have been
destroyed in Berlin at the end of the Second World War.

Cold case review is essentially a document-based process which attempts to draw together any
surviving accounts, typically amongst collectors' manuscript journals, letters, museum catalogues
and other antiquarian records.

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