A thread for Ancient Music, please!!!

[Héctor]

The Hurrian songs are a collection of music inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated from the Hurrian city of Ugarit which date to approximately 1400 BC. One of these tablets, which is nearly complete, contains the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal (also known as the Hurrian cult hymn or A Zaluzi to the Gods, or simply h.6), making it the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world. While the composers' names of some of the fragmentary pieces are known, h.6 is an anonymous work (...) The first published attempt to interpret the text of h.6 was made in 1977 by Hans-Jochen Thiel, and his work formed the basis for a new but still very provisional attempt made 24 years later by Theo J. H. Krispijn, after Hurritology had made significant progress thanks to archaeological discoveries made in the meantime at a site near Boğazkale

Discography: Music of the Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians & Greeks, new expanded edition. Ensemble De Organographia (Gayle Stuwe Neuman and Philip Neuman). CD recording. Pandourion PRDC 1005. Oregon City: Pandourion Records, 2006. [Includes the nearly complete h.6 (as "A Zaluzi to the Gods"), as well as fragments of 14 others, following the transcriptions of M. L. West.]

[ReinerTorheit]

Thank you for this astonishing and thought-provoking posting. I had no idea such musical sources existed!

[Scott Good]

I found this to be quite interesting - a 40,000 yr old instrument! This has pushed back the time of music's known antiquity.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...nstrument.html

It's intonation has been scrutinized - seems like it is diatonic:

http://www.greenwych.ca/fl-compl.htm

[ReinerTorheit]

Originally Posted by Scott Good

I found this to be quite interesting - a 40,000 yr old instrument!

The bone flautist counted 40,000 years-worth bars of rest....

.... and then still came in two bars early as usual

[Héctor]

Yep Reinher and Scott, we owe much to the Sumerians (rather than the Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians)!!!

The lyre was invented by the Sumerians of ancient Iraq around 3200 BCE. Its design was developed from the harp by replacing the single bow shape with two upright arms joined by a crossbar, and the strings, instead of joining the sound box directly, were made to run over a bridge attached to the box.

The bull lyre is one of three excavated from the royal cemetery of Ur. Each lyre had a different animal head protruding from the front of the sound box to denote its pitch: the bull lyre was bass, the heifer lyre was tenor and the stag lyre was alto. All three were made of wood. The bull lyre stood roughly 1.2 meters high. The sound box was defined by a broad border of mosaic in shell, lapis lazuli and red paste, and this border continued onto the rectangular upright arms. The strings were tied to the crossbar and strung down over the bridge to connect at the base of the sound box. Researchers believe the notes constituted the same scale as Queen Shub-Ad's harp and were achieved by the tension of the strings rather than the length.

Sumerian Bull Lyre, Iraq, 3200 BCE

[Scott Good]

Originally Posted by ReinerTorheit

The bone flautist counted 40,000 years-worth bars of rest....

.... and then still came in two bars early as usual

...and rushing.

[ReinerTorheit]

Thanks for the fascination information

The big difficulty - speaking as someone who once wanted to go into musical instrument restoration - is that the actual sounds of instruments can vary enormously when they're conjecturally reconstructed.

For example - was metalcraft sufficiently advanced in 3200BC to make even, durable, reliable metal strings like the ones on the lyre reproduction? Wouldn't the strings more likely have been gut? And how thick?

A thin, tensile gut string will make an attractive high-pitched sound with good sustaining properties. But then again, the player will need to damp the notes manually, so that they don't keep sounding past their intended duration. Thick gut strings will produce a lower and less resonant sound.

Of course it is fascinating to speculate - but rebuilding instruments from pictures is only ever going to give one possibility out of many.

[micrologus]

One of the earliest examples yet found of a complete musical composition from the ancient world. About 200 BC ...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RjBePQV4xE


A pitty there are only fragments of older compositions

[Héctor]

Originally Posted by ReinerTorheit

Was metalcraft sufficiently advanced in 3200BC to make even, durable, reliable metal strings like the ones on the lyre reproduction?

Sumerian metal crafts were so developed that the Ur graves may be taken to represent the whole tradition.

Peter Roger-Stuart Moorey, Ancient mesopotamian materials and industries: the archaeological evidence

[micrologus]

Sumerian music


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H8_13x3JaI