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.

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.