Musical Technologies in the Archaic Mediterranean

This paper presents ongoing research from the Marie Curie project “Musical Identities, Knowledge, and Exchange in the Archaic Greek Mediterranean”. The paper will place the technologies used to make ancient Greek musical instruments in the 7th-5th centuries BCE within the wider nexus of craft and scientific technology that existed in the Mediterranean at that time. The aim of the paper is to better understand how musical technologies were shared and developed alongside other technologies, by drawing on in person examinations of a range of musical instruments, and through comparative analysis of Archaic Greek bone-, wood-, and metal-working technologies more broadly.

While so-called ‘ealy type’ auloi are relatively simple (compared to later examples), they nonetheless required a number of tools of differing specialisations and complexities to manufacture them, but what technologies, in terms of scientific tools, were required? The paper will include detailed treatments of the Sparta, Ephesos, Elgin, and Reading auloi, while also considering recent observations on pitch and scale similarities between early pipes (Hagel 2020). The technologies used to make lyres are more difficult to reconstruct, given the incomplete and limited number of surviving finds. An observational study of the Elgin lyre (including new data on the base of its arms, which have not been previously studied) gives rise to new theories about lyre manufacturing and repair.

Ultimately, this paper asks just how much technology was (or was not) needed to make musical instruments in the 6th century BCE.

Bibliography

Hagel, S. (2020). Understanding Early Auloi: Instruments from Paestum, Pydna and Elsewhere. In La tomba del Tuffatore: Rito, arte e poesia a Paestum e nel Mediterraneo d’epoca tardo-arcaica (pp. 421–459). Pisa: ETS.