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Ancient Music Beyond Hellenisation

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AMBH (Ancient Music Beyond Hellenisation)

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-08-31

From medieval times, Arabic as well as European music was analysed in terms that were inherited from Classical Antiquity. Despite having developed in a very different music culture, Greek theory still informs the understanding of ours - even starting with the term ‘music’. This encumbers the appreciation of different ancient musics besides and after the Hellenised superstratum: either they have left little written record, or they have been discussed in ultimately ‘Greek’ terms. Our project explored relations between Hellenic/Hellenistic music, Near Eastern traditions – emerging in writing in the flourishing musical world of the caliphates – and, as far as possible, African musical life south of Egypt – a region that maintained close ties both with the Hellenised culture of Egypt and with the Arabian Peninsula. It combined approaches of music archaeology, classics and Arabic studies, setting out better to define the relation of the musics we get glimpses of with the tradition of the ‘Classical world’, potentially breaking free of Orientalising bias that has been informing modern views. Crucial to our work was the study and reconstruction, virtual and material, of important archaeological finds of wind instruments retrieved outside the Hellenistic ‘heartlands’, looking for potential traces of ‘foreign’ tonality. Overall, we hoped to gain a better understanding of the cultural relations of various ancient regions in terms of their music, given that music is often central to cultural identities, but also a highly transportable and tradable asset.
As a basis for our studies, we have developed database applications with desktop frontends for rapid data entry and linking. One of these manages the over 200 wind-instrument fragments found in Queen Amanishakheto’s tomb in Meroë, Sudan, now in Boston, as well as 48 pieces from the Oxus temple, now in Dushanbe. In several study sessions, we have documented the items, combining measurements with various photographic, photogrammetric, X-ray and spectroscopic data as well as technical drawings. This required enhancing our software for physical modelling of instrumental pitches and perfecting its interface for producing 3D-printed models, so that it is now also possible to produce working models of ancient mechanisms. Experiments with printed instruments thus lead to a first reconstruction in original materials (Peter Holmes), which was exhibited along the originals at the MFA, Boston, and finally of two complex instruments (Marco Sciascia). As a point of comparison for the Oxus find, we collaborated with music archaeologist Chrēstos Terzēs on the interpretation of two bone instruments with bronze sliders found at Megara, also leading to a playable reconstruction.
In another strand of the project, we evaluated Al-Fārābī’s comments on the construction and tuning of woodwind instruments, and how these relate to lute scales, carefully examining his terminology in the context of Aristotelean philosophy. In order to make Al-Fārābī’s enormous compendium searchable and prepare a translation as well as a better critical edition of crucial parts, we digitised the latest edition and procured digital images of the known manuscripts.
Complementary to the study of Early Islamicate texts on lutes, we re-evaluated published Egyptian lutes from the late antique and early Byzantine periods. This also involved the creation of new software, modelling the pitches of strings of different diameter and material on a fretted board more accurately, and thus predicting optimal placements for the (lost) bridges; an exemplary evaluation of the best-studied instruments both confirmed and improved upon earlier interpretations.
When we found our project schedule shattered by the COVID pandemic, we preliminarily had to obtain measurements for the Oxus find from photographs and drawings, with the invaluable support of Gunvor Lindström, expert on the archaeology of the site. Working from such secondary data involved tedious procedures of quality management, which we facilitated by developing novel software interfaces that allow to experimentally assemble fragments, highlight possible joins or even search for physically plausible configurations of longer sections. In this way, we arrived at a first musical interpretation, starting from an extraordinary instrument section assembled of two concentric bone cylinders. These formed a hitherto unknown type of mechanism, which appears to present the first archaeological corroboration for a musical system that had been reconstructed mainly from literary sources only twenty years ago.
Then we could resume our travels, and at the end of our project, boxes of loose fragments had come together to almost complete (Boston) or partially complete (Dushanbe) pipes, some of them over a metre long. This will not only allow exhibiting them in a proper form; above all, it finally allowed us to assess their tonality. Surprisingly, all studied instruments aligned themselves with the known facts and tenets of ancient ‘Greek’ music, with distinct links to instruments from the Hellenistic and Roman periods we had also studied. Both Central Asia, with its history of rich Hellenistic kingdoms in the aftermath of Alexander's conquest, and even the African kingdom of Kush (the ancient ‘Ethiopia’) thus appear to have participated in Hellenistic music culture.
A different strand of music, physically relying on equally spaced fingerholes or lute frets, could be traced from Antiquity to the early Islamic period. Remaining almost unrecognised in Greek sources, it surfaces in certain instrument finds, from Sumerian and Pharaonic Egyptian doublepipes through late antique lutes. In contrast, the lute (‘ud) that formed the backbone of Arabic music theory was still largely diatonic; our research has suggested that this four-strings-four-frets instrument, which gained unprecedented popularity at the period, variants being played everywhere from Spain to Japan, may ultimately derive from a design that is first attested on a Greek monument.
All in all, a picture of widely shared musical practices emerged, largely expressed in a diatonic framework based on tuning in fifths and fourths, as attested in second-millennium BCE Mesopotamia as well as in Warring-States China and Classical Greece. Within the outreach of distinctly Hellenistic culture, however, music was additionally coloured by sequences of semitones (‘chromatic’) or quartertones (‘enharmonic’): we have found material evidence for all three ‘genera’. Scales with ‘neutral thirds’, on the other hand, which ancient Greek theory would have rejected outright, were evidently old, but never truly recognised before medieval times.
The Meroë find, formerly merely a collection of hundreds of mostly small fragments, can now be appreciated as six instruments of three distinct types, including extremely long pipes with extensive mechanisms. For the first time, we have thus been able to pinpoint material evidence for musical systems either textually transmitted or hypothetically reconstructed from ancient texts – most surprisingly, including a scale that ancient authors represent as the harmony of the revolving planetary spheres. The history of the lute, spanning many centuries and thousands of kilometres, helped us bridging the gap between antiquity and the emerging Arabic sources, where Al-Fārābī used it as a reference point for describing other instruments.
Reconstructions of two auloi from Meroë, made by Marco Sciascia
Reconstruction work on the Meroë isntruments, photo: Stefan Hagel (courtesy MfA, Boston)
Oxus auloi in National Museum of Antiquities of Tajikistan, Dushanbe
Preparing a critical edition with translation of chapters from al-Farabi's Great Book on Music
Database of the Meroë aulos find
3D-printed reconstruction of a long aulos from Meroë
Database of the Oxus aulos find
Meroë auloi reconstructed; from the right: Stefan Hagel, Susanne Gänsicke and Olga Sutkowska
Reconstruction of an Oxus aulos performed by Stefan Hagel in Takht-i Sangin, photo: Gunvor Lindström