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.