Have you ever tried to imagine what music sounded like during the Stone Age or among the ancient Greeks or Sumerians? Here’s an amazing article about the archaeology of ancient music from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article even provides a link to a recording made using this pretty amazing set of discoveries:
“In 1971, Anne D. Kilmer, an Assyriologist at the University of California at Berkeley, deciphered the oldest written music: a late Bronze Age hymn for singer and harpist. She cracked the 3,500-year-old Mesopotamian musical notation used to record the hymn. Inscribed on a cuneiform tablet excavated in the 1950s in modern-day Syria, it even included instructions on how to tune the harp.”
I was particularly struck by the comment that “every creation of historical music is a guess. Musicians can’t easily leave gaps in performances, the way philologists do in incomplete texts.” Historical musical performance sounds to me a lot like historical fiction writing. No blanks allowed for missing information–thank goodness for the human imagination! Maybe this comment caught my attention because I’m researching for a new book, and I’m reading lots of work by philologists with maddening gaps, usually just where the key piece of information I’d love to know would have been had time and wear been a little kinder to that particular clay tablet….
