Reproducing the Sounds Of Ancient Instruments
LONDON — Peter Holmes was holding a Scandinavian war horn more than a meter long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”
With that, Mr. Holmes, 76, put the lur to his lips and blew. It sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.
Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long- forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department and in his North London garden shed.
He is also a central figure in the EuropeanMusic Archaeology Project, or EMAP, a 4-million- euro effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project is unveiling the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on April 2. A touring exhibition will open June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.
And the classical record label Delphian is releasing a series of albums as a tie- in, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.
John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iron Age horn, said that ancient instruments offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”
“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”
The project covers the Paleolithic Era to around A.D. 1000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year- old vulture-bone flutes.
Mr. Holmes’s love of the trumpet led him to trace its origins. In 1962, he found himself reconstructing an antecedent to the instrument that had been found in Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.
“It used to be just a few of us enthusiasts doing it, but now it’s become a lot more professional,” he said. “We’re using high- precision engineering tools, 3-D printers, all sorts of things.”
Mr. Kenny, 59, was introduced to the carnyx in the early 1990s when a Scottish musicologist told him he was needed to help reconstruct one that had been excavated in 1816 at a farm near Deskford, in northern Scotland, but was languishing in a museum storeroom.
A carnyx towers about two meters above the player and is topped by a serpent or boar’s head, with a mouth sometimes able to flap open and closed to mute the sound. The first reconstruction sounded like flatulence, Mr. Kenny said. A second version — which cost 28,000 British pounds to make and required a craftsman to hand-hammer metal for 400 hours — fortunately soared. Mr. Kenny has been playing it ever since.
The EMAP exhibit will feature the Deskford Carnyx as well as re- creations of others, found at a tomb in France and at sites in the Italian Alps and England. The re- creation of the instrument found in England was by Mr. Holmes.
Mr. Kenny, influenced by that striking head, initially played the carnyx as a war instrument. But he soon realized it “was just like a human.”
“If you shout all the time, you lose your voice,” he said. “So I decided to explore its other voices. And the minute I did, I realized it could produce the most enormous amount of colors — far more than a trumpet or trombone.”