This is the oldest piece of music known to humankind. Itâs engraved in cuneiform on a tablet from 1400 BC. And it was a hymn to their goddess Nikkal.
I wasnât actually expecting something serious.
That was, um, actually unexpected.
What is this grand old instrument? It is almost ethereal to my ears!
I wish more ancient music was written down. Itâd be interesting to study it!
Only 15th century BC kids will remember this bop
It wouldâve likely originally been played on a sammĂťm, a bit like a lyre, in accompaniment of a singer.
Whilst its the oldest piece of music, itâs not complete (I believe the oldest complete song is the Seikilos Epitaph), so itâs transcription is controversial; there are a few differing decipherments.
The fact that this recording exists is nothing short of miraculous when you consider all of the background work that you have to do before you put a lyrist in front of a staff-notation transcription. This article will tell you about it in exhaustive detail: https://musicircle.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Babylonian-Notatin-and-the-Hurrian-Melodic-Texts_Music-and-Letters-1994-WEST-161-79.pdf
In short, here are some of the things a musicologist would have to do in order to get to the point where you can start looking for someone who plays an ancient Mesopotamian lyre (yes, the sammĂťm is a type of lyre):
1. Find the tablets. 2. Know enough cuneiform to identify the language, the culture, the time period, and the fact that this is music notation, which was vanishingly rare in a culture where people wrote with a stylus on wet clay. 3. Know what instruments people played and how they were used. 4. Figure out how many strings this instrument had and how they were tuned. This is harder than it looks because, while instruments can sometimes survive millennia, strings tend not to survive, and as any string player knows, tuning often doesnât survive a single performance. 5. Figure out the tuning system â our Western even-tempered scale is a recent invention. J.S. Bach composed the Well-Tempered Clavier to show off even-tempered tuning in 1722. The octave is a creation of physics; dividing the octave into pleasing individual notes that can be put together to make music is a creation of culture, and thereâs no reason to assume that ancient Mesopotamians used modern Western scales. 6. Learn the corpus of music theory that supports the structure of this piece of music. If you know the theory, you can figure out what the music is doing; if you donât know the theory, you have a random string of notes, not music. 7. Because this was only a semi-written culture, music was heavily improvisatory. You have to know that whatâs written down is more of an outline or a suggestion. The real art is in filling in the rest of the pattern. A lot of traditional non-Western music works like this (and up until fairly recently, quite a bit of Western classical music also incorporated this aspect; even today, the art of playing a cadenza is a Thing), so if youâre not an ethnomusicologist, youâll want to bring one in, preferably one who works with contemporary West Asian folk and/or classical forms. 8. Ahhh! At last! Youâve gotten to the point where you think you can figure out what this piece is supposed to sound like. Now you have to transcribe it all into Western staff notation (which isnât designed to handle music like this). 9. Unless you are also an expert on building and playing ancient Mesopotamian lyres, you must now go and find someone who is. Fortunately, there are one or two of these people around. Give that person your music, and book the recording studio! 10. The next time anyone asks you why studying music is important, now you know.
