source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 10:36:01 -0700 Subject: Neanderthal flute From: John Chalmers I think this is fascinating, but I echo Gary's concern about the pitch relations since the flute is not intact. I might also add that not all "archaeomusicologists" accept Kilmer's and Duchesne-Guillemin's interpretation of the Hurrian cult hymn, and Babylonian notation in general, as being polyphonic. It is hard to believe that a musical notation could evolve which did not allow for the easy notation of single notes, but only two-part chords. M.L. West, author of the best book (IMO) on ancient Greek music has written an article "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts," Music and Letters 75(2): 161-179 (1994) in which he/she interprets the dyads as strings to be played by the two hands of the harpist. West does accept the cyclic principle of tuning by 5ths, 4ths and octaves (aka Pythagorean), 7 modes and 12 "chromatic" notes in the octave. West's transcription, however, suggests an extremely repetitive melody and a narrow range. The phrase or line endings do make some musical sense. By a statistical method, David Halperin has come up with a very different transcription which involves a considerable degree of descending scalar motion. His paper is in Musikometrika 4: 101-115 (1992). (the volume # could be 1 as my xerox copy is smeared) The notation and nomenclature may be traced back to King Lipit-Ishtar of Nippur (2nd millennium BCE) and even to the Sumerian ruler Shulgi in the 22nd century BCE. I think the data are sufficient to establish the antiquity of the "Pythagorean" tuning in the West and for that matter the influence of Babylon on Greek math and music ("Harmonics"). Some Chinese sources claim a priority of some 500 years for the discovery of this tuning, but most scholars believe the early Chinese dates to be exaggerated and instead refer to the first emperor, Shih Huang Di, in the 3rd century BCE when Chinese and Hellenic culture came into contact, partly as a result of Alexander's conquests. For what it's worth, West believes neutral intervals to be found on some surviving auloi, as mentioned by Aristoxenos. West also believes Kathleen Schlesinger ignored the unequally spaced holes of the known auloi when she developed the theories expressed in her opus "The Greek Aulos." Certainly neutral intervals are not rare in world music today. The Greek hemiolic chromatic may be the relict of a neutral pentatonic (also the spondeion scale) and neutral intervals are common in Islamic music, Africa, etc. --John Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 7 Apr 1997 00:16 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA00646; Mon, 7 Apr 1997 00:16:27 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA00644 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id PAA13691; Sun, 6 Apr 1997 15:15:00 -0700 Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 15:15:00 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu