This entry was posted on 6/1/2009 11:45 PM and is filed under Footnotes.
A news story was reported this week that an instrument that had not been heard for at least 200 years was played for a modern audience (1). The lituus was an instrument of some antiquity even before the Romans adopted it and gave it the name we know it by.
The lituus is essentially a straight 8.5 feet (2.7m) long trumpet without keys. It was used during Roman religious rites and triumphal processions. The last composer to write for the lituus was none other than J.S. Bach whose motet ‘O Jesus Christ, meins Lebens Licht’ featured the instrument. How did it sound? The BBC report described it as “piercing trumpet-like sound”. Go to their website and listen to the sound and judge for yourself (1). It turns out there is an art, no there is a science, to making a lituus. Particularly clever was the development of software by engineers at the University of Edinburgh to assist in the recreation of the instrument in a case of ancient world meets bleeding edge of the modern world.
As a teenager I was greatly interested in the ‘authentic music’ movement promoted in the 1970s/80s by The Deller Consort and Switzerland’s Schola Cantorum Basiliensis; and later by Austria’s Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Concentus Musicus Wien; France’s Pierre Malgoire and the magnificently named La Grande Ecurie et le Chambre du Roi; and Britain’s Christopher Hogwood and The Academy of Ancient Music. ‘Ancient music’ in this case was any piece after 1600 (that’s ‘AD’ in case you are wondering). Using restored original instruments or faithful reproductions, violins were strung with gut rather than steel wires, brass was played without the aid of keys and woodwind that was mostly made of wood to create sounds the composer would have expected to hear it. Instead of heavy metal or pop, my teenage ears thrilled to the sound of the ‘Mannheim Steamroller’. The authentic music movement has since become mainstream and even some established orchestras playing on modern instruments make a virtue of doing so with ‘period’ technique.
Reconstructing truly ancient music, that is to say of the ancient Greeks and Romans, is a more recent endeavour. Part of the problem is that music was not written down with the notation – the staves, crotchets, quavers – in universal use today. However, observant students spotted on some surviving stone inscriptions and papyri marks associated with alphabetic characters. They interpreted these to be musical notation and applying an understanding of ancient world musical theory, attempts have been made to play the music. Pioneering that rediscovery in sound are Ensemble De Organographia (2), Madrid Atrium Musicae (3) and Synaulia (4) and their CDs are available and well worth listening to. These bands have reconstructed a wide variety of ancient instruments, since most are now extinct, including the double-oboe, kithara, and even the hydraulus, which is a steam-powered organ (it was often played in Roman amphitheatres while gladiators duked it out in the arena). The sounds of the ancient Greeks seem evocative of the Middle East or eastern European folkloric music, but with an unfamiliar haunting tone and rhythm. Sadly only one tiny fragment of a few notes of music survives from the entire Roman period.
These recreations remind us that unlike our digital world where music is ‘on demand’ care of iPods, DVDs and radio, not so very long ago, people made their own music. The Victorians gathered around the piano or fiddle, while Greeks and Romans plucked the lyre or played the panpipes. These same contemporary digital audio technologies are, with careful scholarship and talented musicianship, allowing modern ears to hear again a blast from the very distant past and enjoy a moment’s intimacy with our ancient ancestors.
