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.
But the notation does leave something up to the performer, just a bit more than usual.
Relative changes are what makes the melody, you could transpose it up or down and stretch the pitches every way that you want, change the tempo etc but it still would be (for me, at least) recognizably the same melody.
I often pick up on artists borrowing bits and pieces (and sometimes more than bits) from each other by looking at the structure and the relative changes even if it sounds completely different.
> But the notation does leave something up to the performer, just a bit more than usual.
We don't know how much the notation leaves up to the performer. For all we know there could have been a formal system for tuning the instrument this was intended to be played on and a formal system for rhythm; a musical tradition that makes it very obvious how the piece should have been performed that is now forgotten.
> Relative changes are what makes the melody, you could transpose it up or down and stretch the pitches every way that you want, change the tempo etc but it still would be (for me, at least) recognizably the same melody.
This is not simply a matter of transposition or a tempo difference. No one knows the relative changes in pitch.
A lot more than usual. Leaving the rhythm open to interpretation, much more so than pitch, can lead to wildly different pieces of music. It's like having no punctuation. You can end up with an entirely different piece.
Agreed, although in a lot of systems of early notation the rhythm is sort of implied by the text and contextual clues such as knowing whether a particular piece was a certain sort of dance and therefore the likely range of tempi and main beat stress patterns etc. I think it was around 1300 BCE when western music notation included both pitch and rhythm (with mensural notation).
That's true, without knowing the rhythm and the phrasing it could sound entirely different than it originally did.
But just absolute and relative pitch changes would be fine with me.
Sometimes you can recover some of the rhythm by looking at the notes though. And the shape and size of the Lyre plus knowledge about the materials used could give a fair approximation of what the pitch range should be.
Shape and size won't really help since we'd need to know the string tension and spacing. Otherwise it could be literally any scale with any shape and size. It's hard to express just how enormous the difference between musical modes can be when you leave modern tuning and standards behind. My favorite example of a completely different system of music is Gagaku, Japanese court music with ancestors extending back to Han dynasty China and even beyond. Listen to that next to some Bach; that seems like the possible range of interpretations we might end up with!
Relative changes in pitch are only the simplest level of abstraction in examining a melody. Beyond that, all note events exist relative to chord structure, harmonic ideas, and even other music that performers and listeners are already familiar with. We would be missing everything except that base layer, which I'd argue conveys next to nothing (even pitch, while technically one dimensional, is interpreted cyclically with each octave. So, note 1 is higher than note 2. But is it really the same note, just 1 octave higher? Or is it something in an entirely different key?).
EDIT: Just for illustration, in Bach, the most similar note to a C (with the simplest harmonic relation) is an octave higher/lower C, but the second most similar is a G or F, halfway across the octave! But the most dissimilar is a Gb, a difference of only a half step and directly between those two! From this we can see distance tells us nothing about harmonicity. This is the same issue we see with the difference between major and minor - qualitatively enormous but quantitatively tiny.
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.
You don't really hear the tune... You hear an interpretation of what it might have been like. If you listen to the piece by Dr Anne Kilmer (at 2:50) and then compare it to the other examples, you will struggle to hear a similarity in the tune - at least I couldn't.
I open the link -- the whole page is covered with a message I could barely get closed "WEVE DETECTED AN ADBLOCKER" meanwhile the key piece of the article is someone else's YouTube video. How many people would be looking at this article if they weren't freeloading off someone else's content and it had no A/V? Give me a break.
> It looks like you’re using an ad blocker. With almost half of web users now running ad blockers, it’s now getting very hard to sustain an educational website and keep it free.
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I do not know what kind of advertisement they host, but it is perfectly feasible (if less lucrative) to host privacy-preserving user-friendly ads.
I adblock everything anyway as the internet is generally terrible, but I am aware that many good intentioned website are caught in the crossfire of this war.
Imagine telling the writers that their music would be played by someone 3000 years later.
1) The playing could be "recorded"
2) heard all across the world by various people for free of cost
3) this "recording" could be shared by "radio" waves
In line with the topic of old/ancient sounds and music, I found The Soundscape[0] by Murray Schafer[1] (TIL he died last year) very interesting. I enjoy what I think is a wide range of music styles, some of which are best experienced (by me, to any extent) when listened to very loud, yet his concept of "ear cleansing" is one I found compelling.
We know which strings were plucked but we don’t know how the instrument was tuned or how long the notes were… as cool as this is, I wouldn’t really say this is the oldest *known* song (there are older that we know equally little about).
If two independent teams recreate this song based on our best knowledge about how the song sounded, can you tell these renditions are two versions of the same song?
Not a perfect test (experts can recognize more similarities) but generally makes it possible to discern "we know jack shit" from "we know the melody, just maybe not exactly how the instrument sounded".
I listen to a lot of old music where there are many different renditions of the same song, especially Armenian folk music that was either unwritten or transcribed later, and I agree with this metric.
I don't know at which level of detail this line of thinking stops, but it's certainly somewhere after "we don't know the pitch or rhythm for any of the notes in this piece, we can only make educated guesses." Just because we don't have a clear line where the pedantry starts doesn't mean every discussion on the topic is pedantic.
I agree with the other comments here - you should be able to recognize the different renditions as such with an untrained ear.
Basically I’d start with knowing the notes of the song… kinda the most important thing but we just just don’t for this
I’ll note here too that the article is what draws that line (known vs unknown) not me - I’m just disagreeing with where they have drawn the line since there are older songs that we… “know equally little about”
If, presented the original work, I could realistically recognize it in the reconstruction, you're at a good level of detail. Here, we're talking about work in an artform that is embodied by pitch and rhythm, and the "reconstruction" was created knowing neither, so it is very unlikely that it would resemble the original work.
Music from 1400BC is cool, but the real throwback is the 2009 YouTube video in the article that starts with Weird Al's "eBay" and default animated text.
So, firstly he tells us near the start that the music we're listening to the oldest known musical piece and then at the end he tells us that we don't really know what it sounded like?
It is unreal how I am listening to the oldest song in recorded history as I look at machine-created art crafted by text and images given to Stable Diffusion.
Because there is no rhythm or pitch information recorded, it sounds the way you'd expect it to sound because that's nearly the only thing these interpretations have to work with.
Two old yet alive Indian languages Sanskrit and Tamil have hymns even older. I wonder why Sanskrit and it's rich collection of hymns completely gets ignored.
Nasadiya Suktam[0] from RigVeda[1] ponders the questions of our origins in sweet melody.
Hurrian Hymn No. 6 is not European, and this does not claim to be older than the Rig Veda. The difference is that the vedas do not describe melodies; just literature. They were probably sung with specific melodies, but nobody knows what the originals are anymore
That last line really came out of nowhere. Why did she even include it?
Is there people demolishing mosques and raping nuns? What a wild thing to allege at the end of an otherwise reasonable opinion on the evolution of languages.
Goodness. The key accused was granted bail after two years in prison. Such brazen complicity from the entire justice system in India. The police watched. The judges only convicted three people in an act that seems to have in various degrees involved tens of people. And who knows how many of those convicted were released.
Plenty of things can be older than 3400 years if you go by philological theory. It's completely different from a text that's actually, provably, archeologically at least 3400 years old.
In Sumer/Akkadia/Babylonia/Mesopotamia (sorry, I always confuse them with each other) we have oldest writings ever and oldest songs ever, simply because they used burned clay to write stuff and that survives the longest.
Other cultures either didn’t write stuff down, or they did, but on less resilient material. For example Egypt civilisation is probably older, but they used papyrus, which survives less than clay.
edit: I guess I am wrong, see below
So this song is not really “oldest song ever”, that is a hyperbole, but oldest surviving writing of a song.
The civilizations in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia invented writing around the same time. Sure, hieratic or cursive hieroglyphs in ink on papyrus is less durable than cuneiform impressed in clay (which more often than not, was not intentionally baked). But the Egyptians also carved and painted hieroglyphs in/on stone and that's plenty durable. Also, papyrus in Egypt survives much better than elsewhere because of the hot and dry climate. There's writing on papyrus that's 4,500 years old.
The disagreement over whether writing was first invented in Egypt or Mesopotamia is mostly one of delineating writing and protowriting. There's plenty of examples in both cultures of markings from both sides of that divide, wherever it may actually lie.
Proto-writing in Sumer predates proto-hieroglyphs in Egypt. It is thought that writing in Egypt was inspired by the ‘idea’ of written communication in Sumer
Gunung padang claimed older than giza and mayan pyramid by some archeologist. If this true, java culture by times are much more advanced than the middle east or latin area. Including music.
