Studien zur Musikarchaologie, IV.

• Author: Crocker, Richard
• Position: Book review

Studien zur Musikarchaologie, IV. Edited by ELLEN HICKMANN and RICARDO EICHMANN. Orient-Archaologie, vol. 15. Rahden, Westphalia: VERLAG MARIE LEIDORF, 2004. Pp. xxvi + 583, illus.

This impressive volume reports on a conference and at the same time honors Ellen Hickmann for her decades-long leadership of the aspirations of scholars for a broader mission for Music Archaeology--to create new and better ideas of music as it was in the past, and thereby present a discipline as comprehensive as that of the sister disciplines Music History and Music Sociology (Ethnomusicology). The present volume includes studies that range from traditional reports on musical artifacts--still the bedrock of ideas about music before history in the sense of written verbal reports--to studies that are fully contextual, self-conscious in method, and ready to use, whatever circumstantial evidence is available.

Axel May (p. 445) reports on a bronze aulos player of the Hallstatt epoch. Robert Gutmann (p. 409) provides the Romanian panflute with an abundance of associations from mythology. Moshe Fischer (p. 437) locates a terracotta trigonon player in Hellenistic Israel. Sebastian Nunez and Veronica Estevez (p. 451) describe the recovery and reconstruction of two citterns from a seventeenth-century Dutch shipwreck, Simon O'Dwyer (p. 393) narrates the recovery of an artefact called the "Becan horn" in eighteenth-century Ireland, and the making of a reproduction in 2000. Stefan Hagel (p. 373) works out the probable tuning and heterophonic use of the best preserved surviving Greek aulos by acoustic calculations resulting from his special software program. Ricardo Eichmann (p. 363) discourses on the differences between reproducing Egyptian spike lutes from appearances and from design principles.

In a review of numerous artifacts of three basic north European types from the first millennium--lyre-type, panflutes of the block type, bone pipes-Graeme Lawson (p. 61) draws careful generalities about the intents of instrument-makers as expressed in long, widely dispersed traditions. Maurice Byrne (p. 391) points out a historical implication of the subharmonic of the fourth below in narrow bore pipes. Bo Lawergren (p. 295) lays out the physical development of the Qinzither from the earliest extant (ca. 433 B.C.E.) to the classical form towards 1000 C.E. using iconographic and literary evidence. Margaret Bastin (p. 311) sketches the history of the Yal (bow- or angle-harp) in Tamil...