Sound Tracks: Uncovering Our Musical Past Graeme Lawson
(Vintage, £25)
GRAEME LAWSON is an archaeologist who plays the viola and the fiddle, as well as replicas of ancient instruments, and he combines these passions in this book, an exhaustive work that traces the musical strata of the past four million years and is an avid, if occasionally breathless, detective story. Comprising 12 parts divided into
50 ‘microhistories’, it can seem daunting, but the reader is taken in hand by Mr Lawson’s expert prose, which shows a winning attachment to the objects and cultures he finds. Those of an archaeological bent will admire the lightly worn scholarship, whereas the general reader will savour rare opportunities to look over the shoulder of prehistory’s answer to Poirot.
Told in reverse chronology, the narrative features a particularly crucial turning point at about
AD1400. It is here that the focus begins to shift from uncovering ‘material hardware’—the instruments that tell of a musician’s
experience—to discoveries offering ‘a direct line to the actual software’, the melodies and codes that are preserved on ancient surfaces. The uniting force of these elements, going back thousands of years, gives the book its power, with tablets from Bronze Age Syria, bell-casting pits in Transylvania and Peruvian whistling flasks and panpipes. Their tales, combining educated and imaginative leaps, are told with disarming beauty. You never know where the author is going next or where he will find another molecule of our musical DNA, from a new junction on the A14 or the banks of the Nile.
At times, the reach can leave you reeling. Individual chapters may be pithy, yet they also make you wish for a tighter thematic approach (as prefigured in the prologue and in the waterbound second section). However, there is no questioning the author’s love of sharing his knowledge, as when we’re invited to gaze with him at the ruins of an ancient library containing the oldest written melodies. Imagining their calls and those of ‘a still-to-be-charted musical past’, this ambitious, expansive history bids us relish the tuneful ingenuity of our ancestors. Gavin Plumley