Golden oldies
Here’s a book that turns the history of music on its head, beginning in the present day before burrowing back through the layers of time to our forefathers, Australopithecus, somewhere between two and four million years ago.
As an archaeologist, musicologist and historian, Graeme Lawson is here not interested in the traditional musicological stomping ground of stylistic eras and notable composers, but in the material traces of the musical past that have survived into our present day. And in this brilliant new book he reveals to us a dazzling showcase of instruments, both everyday and extraordinary, that have been found in locations as diverse as Baltic Sea shipwrecks and Egyptian tombs.
In short, vivid chapters, we encounter a Baroque fiddle in near-perfect, 17th-century condition; a cache of flutes carved from sheep-bone in medieval Germany; and a frozen Iron Age harp locked in ice on a Siberian plateau. Turn to any page and there’s bound to be something new to discover. It might be a quirky fact: did you know that a piano roll of the first movement of Grieg’s Piano Concerto is about 30 metres long? Or it could be an unexpected question: if the ancient poem of Beowulf used to be sung with a lyre, would it have been danced to as well?
Yet these examples, engaging as they are, are not what makes this book special. That rests in the way Lawson draws out what each musical object tells us not only about human life but our understanding of the past; what archaeology can and cannot tell us; and the very nature of music itself. Take the case of ‘tree-bark flutes’, created in spring from loose bark, existing only for a few hours or days before they crack. Their decay is a reminder, says Lawson, that this book’s treasures are “no more than a small part of humanity’s lost music”. Still, what a wealth there is to discover here.
Rebecca Franks, music writer and a classical music critic for The Times