Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Organology Study Group.

The nature of music in Antiquity has long been among the most obscure areas of music history. In 1932, Wilfrid Perrett reported the inalterable opinion of a classicist colleague that “Nobody has ever made head or tail of Greek music, and nobody ever will. That way madness lies.” However, in recent decades our understanding of Greco-Roman music has grown by leaps and bounds, through the careful parsing of the extant speculative theoretical tradition – almost entirely devoid of information on musical practice – but also through re-engagement with archeological finds of ancient musical instruments, some in incredibly fragile or fragmentary states. This study of the material culture of ancient music-making provides us with a sense of the affordances of the instruments, and thus the range of their potential uses in musical practice, and provides a counterweight to the highly mathematical theoretical tradition.

In a keynote address to the Organology Study Group of the AMS, Stefan Hagel will present the results of an international collaborative study of a cache of fragmentary Greek-style doublepipes (auloi) of a particularly sophisticated design from the late first century BCE excavated in the former Kushite Empire (present-day Sudan). His presentation will focus on the interpretive process of reassembling the doublepipes and the implications of the resulting instruments, which illustrate the physical challenges involved in the art of reed doublepipes in the context of ancient harmonic theory and the transmitted melodies, and the innovative ways in which ancient instrument makers and performers met these challenges. The keynote will be augmented by functional replicas of the doublepipes to demonstrate the practicability of some proposed interpretations.

This session will exemplify the conceptual, theoretical, cultural, and practical implications of detailed organological study of material objects, in this case, archaeological finds which provide access to the past. While Antiquity is remote, sifting through the evidence of ancient musical practices does more than flesh out a slim early chapter in music history textbooks. Recent years have seen experimental performances on ancient instruments by practitioners of New Music, the birth of a small but energetic “aulos revival,” as well as more scholarly performances of reconstructed Greco-Roman music. We continue to generate new cultural constructions about Antiquity and its relation to ourselves. At a time when resurgent white supremacists and Western chauvinists seek to lay claim to the culture and art of Antiquity (and the Middle Ages) within an imaginary of a bygone monocultural, white, and separable West, the Meroë doublepipes disrupt such specious tidy narratives. They demonstrate the diffusion of Hellenistic musical practices in northern Africa, if not the craft of making the instruments themselves, and hint at a far more interconnected, multicultural, and syncretic ancient world than we might think.