In a somewhat similar vein, here's Peter Pringle singing the opening lines of The Epic of Gilgamesh (written 4,000 years ago), using our best guess at Sumerian pronunciation and playing a modern recreation of an instrument that the Sumerians would have had, as an attempt to guess what ancient Sumerian music might have sounded like: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
Whoa, that was epic to hear. Thanks for posting this!
I keep coming across The Epic of Gilgamesh a lot recently. As one of the oldest stories, it comes up a fair bit in discussions of myth and the hero's journey. (Joseph Campbell references it in his Hero with a Thousand Faces.) I also found it again through another lens when reading about Jungian archetypes, where Gilgamesh himself helps demonstrate the masculine archetype of the King. I've been meaning to read the original story, but I'd never thought to punch it into YouTube.
4,000 years isn't that long ago. People back then were basically just like us. It's not hard to imagine them gathering around, excited after a long day (or a long year) of work, chatting with their friends in some little ur-amphitheater that's long since been reduced to dust. Some traveling singer takes the stage, and a hush falls over the crowd as the first notes echo out.
If you appreciated that, you might also appreciate the vast array of world music performed by Arany Zoltan. He's one of my favorites. You'll find both ancient and more modern world tunes, all played with fine skill. Not sure about Sumerian though.
This was reconstructed from fingering instructions with no information on rhythm or pitch. Maybe by looking at the crude drawings available of the instrument to make a better guess what the pitches might be, but this is definitely more of a creative interpretation than a historical record.
Even if rhythm and pitch were available it would still be a creative interpretation. With full sheet music we don't always know the full intention of the composer or the nuances that would be taught in person.
> Even if rhythm and pitch were available it would still be a creative interpretation.
The important difference here I think is that with a well-defined and understood notation there is a shared frame of reference for interpretation. I can take take two interpretations of works from BWV where the performers can liberally indulge in artistic license where the notation leaves something up to the performer, and I can reflect on the differences and similarities without ever mistaking them for different compositions.
Here, it is not just the interpretation of the notation by the performer that requires creative license, but the interpretation by who ever "transcribed" it to modern notation. The video in the article plays two different such interpretations that for obvious reasons then sound entirely different and are not recognizable as the same piece of music, because they really are not.
If you take away the pitch and rhythm information from BWV and add a long forgotten system of tablature for some long forgotten instrument that we've only ever seen represented as crude carvings and ask people to transcribe and play it, you'd get similar results.
Yes but there's different degrees of creative interpretation. To
boomlinde's point, modern "reconstructions" of the hymn differ wildly, to the point that a listener wouldn't be able to tell they were the same song, or even that they were really related.
If your argument is just that "everything boils down to a creative interpretation", I don't see how this is a really meaningful or interesting take.
The point is that there are widely varying degrees of creative interpretation, and this "transcription" is _nothing_ at all like interpreting a piece of sheet music.
I appreciate the article included different versions of the song.
That serves as a reminder that this song is more or less "reconstructed" from the forever-lost original one and also lets us compare their interpretations.
Surprisingly, I love the samuraiguitarist version : there is something unique in the mix of new technology and ancient music but also a melancholy only electric guitar (and violin?) can bring...
On a side note and like another comment mentioned : it's surprising that, like when I've read Gilgamesh (oldest known written story), there is a very modern feel to it. Not much really changed in 3400 years except for technology...
Perhaps your surprising feeling relates to the fact that storytelling is a very old art, and we have been practising it intensely for a long time.
In the greater scheme, maybe 3400 years isn't as long for storytelling as it is for most arts and practices that you'd be comparing to. Rock n Roll from 2022 isn't that different to someone from 2002. Rock and Roll from 1972 is very different to 1952. You could blow a 1952 mind mind with Ziggy Stardust or Houses of the Holy.
But the fact that the way the story was told (the structure of the story) as well as the characters psychology was very "modern".
For example, I think I can't like japanese literature (for the few I've read) because of their weird way of telling stories [0]. So I would have expected something older and less "cosmopolitan" to be harder to get into... Well perhaps the translator took some "freedom" by modernizing it.
There will be at most something like 5000 de novo mutations along any evolutionary line from 3400 BP. Compare that to 3 million differences between any two human genomes. It's clear from this basic fact that very little evolutionary time has passed, and people from then and now would be indistinguishable in virtually all aspects.
The recreations are absurdly western sounding. The middle east has a long history of not using 12-tone equal temperament scales of Europe and while it's somewhat interesting to fantasize what it would sound like in the common current context, it seems a little white-washing and disingenuous.
> The recreations are absurdly Western sounding… white-washing and disingenuous
From the article—
“University of California emeritus professor of Assyriology Anne Kilmer spent 15 years researching the tablet, before transcribing it into modern musical notation in 1972.”
I’m sure Professor Kilmer, who has spent her entire career studying these civilizations and resurrecting some small piece of their history and culture for our modern generations to enjoy and appreciate before they disappear forever, would be thrilled to hear you summarize her decades of work as “white washing”.
The music is published and open source - anyone can go and play it! Publish their own interpretation! They already seem to range from authentic recreations of traditional instruments to a modern guitar.
Congratulations to Dr. Kilmer on her incredible work.
Agreed. Nobody knows what it would sound like, but I can't imagine it would sound as someone like myself plucking notes off a fretted guitar. You only have to look at contemporary music outside of Western tradition to hear something which doesn't sound anything like that.
There are hymns 1-5 (tho this is just order of discovery / classification), however the rest is too fragmentary and incomplete to reconstruct anything.
The title is a bit misleading this is the world’s oldest know complete (kinda) piece. As in something we can reconstruct and play.
Though even that’s hedging a lot as the original notation only explains string positions (which strings are manipulated). Scale, rhythm, technique, etc… are all missing, so there are wild divergences from the base reconstruction (samurai guitarist has a video on it).
Oldest written song perhaps. Or even oldest written document of a song, there maybe very well be later writings of a older song
For the title of oldest known song, Wouldn't the Vedas(Rig Veda in particular) predate this time frame ?
They are also hymns and their oral intonations were specifically preserved in transmission .
Probably not. The date the Vedas were created is not settled. The common dating is "1500BCE-1000BCE", but more modern research generally goes for the closer end of that range, making the Hymn to Nikkal older.
Readit News
I keep coming across The Epic of Gilgamesh a lot recently. As one of the oldest stories, it comes up a fair bit in discussions of myth and the hero's journey. (Joseph Campbell references it in his Hero with a Thousand Faces.) I also found it again through another lens when reading about Jungian archetypes, where Gilgamesh himself helps demonstrate the masculine archetype of the King. I've been meaning to read the original story, but I'd never thought to punch it into YouTube.
4,000 years isn't that long ago. People back then were basically just like us. It's not hard to imagine them gathering around, excited after a long day (or a long year) of work, chatting with their friends in some little ur-amphitheater that's long since been reduced to dust. Some traveling singer takes the stage, and a hush falls over the crowd as the first notes echo out.
In those days, in those distant days...
https://m.youtube.com/c/AranyZolt%C3%A1n/videos
The important difference here I think is that with a well-defined and understood notation there is a shared frame of reference for interpretation. I can take take two interpretations of works from BWV where the performers can liberally indulge in artistic license where the notation leaves something up to the performer, and I can reflect on the differences and similarities without ever mistaking them for different compositions.
Here, it is not just the interpretation of the notation by the performer that requires creative license, but the interpretation by who ever "transcribed" it to modern notation. The video in the article plays two different such interpretations that for obvious reasons then sound entirely different and are not recognizable as the same piece of music, because they really are not.
If you take away the pitch and rhythm information from BWV and add a long forgotten system of tablature for some long forgotten instrument that we've only ever seen represented as crude carvings and ask people to transcribe and play it, you'd get similar results.
The point is that there are widely varying degrees of creative interpretation, and this "transcription" is _nothing_ at all like interpreting a piece of sheet music.
That serves as a reminder that this song is more or less "reconstructed" from the forever-lost original one and also lets us compare their interpretations. Surprisingly, I love the samuraiguitarist version : there is something unique in the mix of new technology and ancient music but also a melancholy only electric guitar (and violin?) can bring...
On a side note and like another comment mentioned : it's surprising that, like when I've read Gilgamesh (oldest known written story), there is a very modern feel to it. Not much really changed in 3400 years except for technology...
Perhaps your surprising feeling relates to the fact that storytelling is a very old art, and we have been practising it intensely for a long time.
In the greater scheme, maybe 3400 years isn't as long for storytelling as it is for most arts and practices that you'd be comparing to. Rock n Roll from 2022 isn't that different to someone from 2002. Rock and Roll from 1972 is very different to 1952. You could blow a 1952 mind mind with Ziggy Stardust or Houses of the Holy.
But the fact that the way the story was told (the structure of the story) as well as the characters psychology was very "modern".
For example, I think I can't like japanese literature (for the few I've read) because of their weird way of telling stories [0]. So I would have expected something older and less "cosmopolitan" to be harder to get into... Well perhaps the translator took some "freedom" by modernizing it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishotenketsu
You can get more info here for example: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA
From the article—
“University of California emeritus professor of Assyriology Anne Kilmer spent 15 years researching the tablet, before transcribing it into modern musical notation in 1972.”
I’m sure Professor Kilmer, who has spent her entire career studying these civilizations and resurrecting some small piece of their history and culture for our modern generations to enjoy and appreciate before they disappear forever, would be thrilled to hear you summarize her decades of work as “white washing”.
The music is published and open source - anyone can go and play it! Publish their own interpretation! They already seem to range from authentic recreations of traditional instruments to a modern guitar.
Congratulations to Dr. Kilmer on her incredible work.
The title is a bit misleading this is the world’s oldest know complete (kinda) piece. As in something we can reconstruct and play.
Though even that’s hedging a lot as the original notation only explains string positions (which strings are manipulated). Scale, rhythm, technique, etc… are all missing, so there are wild divergences from the base reconstruction (samurai guitarist has a video on it).
For the title of oldest known song, Wouldn't the Vedas(Rig Veda in particular) predate this time frame ? They are also hymns and their oral intonations were specifically preserved in transmission .