Sound Tracks: Uncovering our Musical Past, Graeme Lawson, Penguin, £25

What kinds of music have been heard across millennia of human history? The further back we go, in the almost wholesale absence of methods of recording music using notation, it’s impossible to know for certain. What is possible is to think about the kinds of sounds that musical instruments are likely to have made. In Sound Tracks, Graeme Lawson asks the reader to do just that, by presenting scores of finds from the archaeological record and describing the often curious and unfamiliar circum­stances surrounding their discovery. The book works backward chronologically, beginning with a 19th-century harp found in a shipwreck off the Sussex coast in 2017 and ending with the fossilised vulture-bone pipe found in 2006 in Hohle Fels, Swabia, that dates to around 40,000 years BC.

Standard historical treatments, Lawson notes, tend to start in the distant past and proceed to the present. As an archaeologist (as well as a musician and music historian), Lawson reminds us that when practitioners of that discipline conduct excavations, they generally begin with the most recent layer and work downwards to the earlier ones. His survey is no less extensive in geographical terms: it des­cribes musical artefacts ranging from medieval English trumpets and Aztec flutes to an Irish harp preserved in a peat bog. En route we learn about such instruments as warbling pots from seventh-century Peru, the three-stringed lute from a tomb in Byzantine Egypt, and the extraordinary third-century AD hydraulic organ from Aquincum in Roman Hungary.

Such objects can give us a reasonable basis for reconstructing the kind of sounds that would have rung in the ears of the people who played or heard them. However, music only emerges with the advent of notation. One of the earliest melodies was etched in cuneiform by a scribe called Ammurabi on a clay tablet from Bronze-Age Syria. Its interpretation, however, is far more disputed; the melody attached to the words of the short song on a marble column from around AD 200 inscribed in Greek, indicating a tune that sounds not dissimilar to strains of Gregorian plainsong from the ninth and 10th centuries.

While Lawson expressly chooses not to privilege music over sound (the subtitle ‘Our Musical Past’ blurs the distinction), scored music alone allows instrumentalists and singers to play and sing tunes composed from the ninth century AD onward with reasonable assurance about how they were meant to sound in an earlier millennium. The shapes and melodies of early European music are preserved by the neum­s of Gregorian chant and by the stave notation – the system musicians use today – devised by the monastic teacher Guido of Arezzo in the 11^th century. However, the Seikilos column also uses a notation that employs alphabetic and other symbols: this was invented in the fifth century BC, and is well understood thanks to the survival of theoretical writings by Aristoxenus, Aristides, and other musical authors going back to classical antiquity.

What was long lacking for ancient Greek music were actual scores, i.e. documents that used the notation to inscribe, for practical or display purposes (on papyrus or stone), melodies and perhaps some kind of harmony. Such scores have increasingly come to light since the 16^th century, and around 60 are now widely available, expertly edited, for scholarly scrutiny and musical realisation. The most ample documents are two inscriptions on stone from Delphi that date to 127 BC, which contain substantial remains of notated music representing two hymns sung by choirs in honour of the god Apollo. The most intriguing is a papyrus fragment, now in the Austrian National Library, containing a section of a sung chorus from Euripides’ tragedy Orestes (produced in 408 BC). The most elegantly presented is the above-mentioned Seikilos Column – so-called because the composer identifies himself on the stone by the name Seikilos, the Greek form of Latin Siculus meaning ‘the Sicilian’.

The three-foot high column was discovered during the constr­uction of the Ottoman railway in Turkey around 1866, and eventually ended up in the house of the chief engineer Edward Purser. Not understanding its value, Mrs Purser had the bottom sawn off straight so that it could serve as a flowerpot-stand. Fortunately, the words of a complete four-line song with accompa­nying musical notation survive. A fragment of a woman’s name, Euterpe, can be read at the bottom, and the words (here the syllabic rhythm and the AABB rhyme scheme follow the Greek) run as follows:

While you live, shine bright!

Don’t let sorrow you benight.

For a brief span we have life to spend:

To everything Time demands an end.

‘Given that the message of the lyric is to “live for today”, or carpe diem,’ asks Lawson, ‘has it perhaps served as a grave marker?’ Yet the song’s Epicurean sentiment is one reason why we might suspect that it was not, as it is often termed, an ‘epitaph’. Since ‘Euterpe’ is the name of the muse of lyric poetry, the column was perhaps intended to advertise Seikilos’s musical expertise. Foreign musical guilds are attested in Anatolia during this period, and he might have been an immigrant musician of Sicilian extraction.

The melody on the stone is worth dwelling on. In spoken Greek the voice ascended and descended in pitch, we are told, on accented syllables; here the tune casually but skilfully conforms to such word profiles. It also demonstrates clever word-painting: a general pitch rise in the first line accompanies the upbeat instruction ‘shine bright’, while the despondent descent on ‘benight’ (Greek lypoû) and on the final words are imitative of the sentiments expressed. This composition is of signal import­ance both for confir­m­ing the principles of ancient Greek melodisation and for offering significant parallels to a shared European musical idiom: the melody itself recurs in the 12th-century Christian Latin antiphon, Hosanna Filio David. It is a crucial piece of evidence for the contro­versial but increasingly likely proposition that Western musical traditions may be traced back to the music of ancient Greece.

Considerations of this nature are secondary to Lawson’s purpose, largely because the widely extended archaeological record is bound to present singular­ities rather than continuities. The trumpet found in Tutankh­amun’s tomb looked and sounded like a Roman tuba, but the instruments were developed entirely independently. Rather, the examples Lawson compiles raise questions about the universality of musical practices, and of human beings’ experience of sound. At the end of the book we dive into the earliest period of homo sapiens, and Lawson muses about the ‘musical pot­en­­tial’ that human beings have displayed from prehistoric eras. In modern times that potential was nicely demonstrated by the invention of calypso music. After public disorder in Trinidad in the 1930s led to a ban on the use of bamboo drums, locals started to experiment with the empty oil drums piled up near the island’s oilfields. Steelpan drums were invented, and the sound of steel bands was soon to be heard the world over. Stories of this kind abound in Sound Tracks, along with a host of historical and musical details that provide food for thought about the nature and scope of the human musical impulse – in many cases, admittedly, leaving both author and reader with more questions than answers.