Prehistoric man played the blues!!
BROOKERD_at_BCEPO04@ccmail.worldcom.com
Tue, 10 Sep 96 12:54:37 cst
I saw this article on my news service at work today. Thought it might
be a little interesting to those involved in the flute discussion.
Looking forward to Glenn's comments on this.
BIRMINGHAM, England, Sept 10 (Reuter) - Bone flutes and wooden pipes
found by archaeologists show ancient musicians deliberately played
off-pitch or "blue" notes like modern jazz and blues musicians, a
scientist said on Tuesday.
First results from a study show of how ancient intruments were
actually used show the prehistoric players used techniques like
sliding fingers over fllute holes to "bend" notes.
Some flutes, made from bird and sheep bones as well as wood, were
also carefully tuned to make these evocative sounds.
"They were playing 'blue' notes in the jazz sense, notes which
are slightly off line," Doctor Graeme Lawson of the University of
Cambridge, head of the study, told reporters at Britain's main science
festival.
The research, which is currently concentrating on medieval and
Roman era flutes, could eventually yield details of ancient musicians'
favourite harmonies, said Lawson, trained as both an archaeologist and
a musician.
Studying the instruments alongside 12th century music notations
from, for example, the troubadours in France could eventually even
give clues to prehistoric melodies.
"That is work for the future, but it does seem that some of the
rather archaic melodies within those repertories lie comfortably
within the compass of some of these simple instruments," said Lawson.
The breakthrough came when researchers realised that some of the
flutes they were looking at had been discarded by their makers because
they could not be tuned correctly.
Working out which instruments were tuned to their maker's
satisfaction meant researchers were able to study microscopic signs of
wear on flutes that were actually played to show where and how fingers
were placed.
The researchers used carefully crafted replicas to test the
sounds made by flutes, prototypes of the modern-day recorder.
Lawson's team hopes eventually to work out how bone pipes from
the old stone age more than 20,000 years ago were played.
But Lawson said he believed that even stone age musicians were
playing "blue" notes.
-END-
Not my area of expertise but it seems to me that a few "quantum leaps"
were made in their assumptions. Hope this is found interesting to
some of you out there.
Darrin Brooker
drb@inforamp.net