The reconstruction of ancient greek auloi

asta? BR.DELS XY . NA Ez 1 \ Taylor we & Francis MA& Francis Group The Reconstruction of Ancient Greek auloi Author(s): J. G. Landels Source: World Archaeology, Vol. 12, No. 3, Archaeology and Musical Instruments (Feb., 1961), pp. 298-302 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www jstor.org/stable/124241 Accessed: 27/10/2013 15:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org. Taylor & Francis, Lid. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Archaeology. http://www jstor.org This content dawalnaded from 197 87 31 Man Sun 97 Mer 701% 18-49-13 PM

7KH5HFRQVWUXFWLRQRI$QFLHQW*UHHNDXORL $XWKRU V -*/DQGHOV 6RXUFH:RUOG$UFKDHRORJ\9RO1R$UFKDHRORJ\DQG0XVLFDO,QVWUXPHQWV )HE  SS 3XEOLVKHGE\Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 6WDEOH85/http://www.jstor.org/stable/124241 . $FFHVVHG Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Archaeology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 192.87.31.20 on Sun, 27 Oct 2013 15:49:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Plate 61 (far left) Xanthos. Relief. Sixth century B.C. (Istanbul Museum) Plate 62 (left) Assyrian quartet (oblique and straight lyres, timbrel and cymbals). First millennium B.c. (Louvre) Plate 63 (far left) Elamite lute and small rectangular lyre, cylinder seal. Fourteenth century B.c. (Louvre) Plate 64 (left) Babylonian lute. c. 1800 B.C. terracotta. (Louvre) I Peer LL — me co — T Il LL Plate 65 Upper finger-hole section of a typical aulos Plate 66 Sections of the Reading aulos separated during restoration

The reconstruction of ancient Greek auloi J. G. Landels Of all the surviving remains of ancient Greek musical instruments, the fragments of auloi are the most important and the most informative; though long the subject of study (Howard 1893; Schlesinger 1939; Becker 1966) the difficulties involved in interpreting their evidence, and in any attempt to reconstruct a complete instrument from them, are very severe. The purpose of this article is to survey the main problems and to pinpoint the main difficulties. Firstly, the surviving instruments and fragments are not a truly representative sample. Most of the important archaeological sites (e.g. Delos, Perachora, Corinth and the Athenian Agora: Landels 1964) have yielded a quota of fragments; but the great majority of them were found among rubbish deposits, and were there precisely because they were damaged and useless. An important exception to this is the Brauron aulos, deposited in an underground spring as a votive to Artemis (Landels 1963). This means that the only instruments which we can hope to reconstruct from them will be cheap, simple ones; no professional player would ever be likely to throw away a serviceable instrument, of the elaborate and expensive kind which we know to have been in use from the late fifth century B.c. onwards, with metal keywork and ornamentation. Once again, there are a few exceptions — the four Pompeian auloz, which may possibly have been in an instrument-maker’s workshop when the eruption occurred (Howard 1893; 47-55; Ward-Perkins and Claridge 1976: (no. 199), and the metal instruments found at Meroé, which may have been funerary offerings (Bodley 1946). Secondly with very few exceptions these fragments are of bone or ivory, and are listed as such in the excavation reports. But we know from literary evidence that the most common material for the aulos was reed (kalamos) — a very perishable substance. Because the lengths of reed available to the instrument-maker were much longer than the available pieces of bone (usually from the tibia of a deer or sheep) the finger-hole section of the body would have been made in one piece, whereas that of a bone instrument had at least one join in the middle. Needless to say, apart from very rare exceptions, only one of the bone pieces survives. Another even more serious problem arises from the fact that the aulos was a double pipe, and that the two pipes (this is beyond reasonable doubt) sounded together. This means that in order to gain information on the playing technique from surviving remains, World Archaeology Volume 12 No. 3 © R.K.P. 1981 Musical instruments 0043-8243/81/1203-0298

The reconstruction of ancient Greek auloi we need to find two complete, or almost complete pipes, which can confidently be treated as a matched pair. The only two which come anywhere near to meeting this condition are the Elgin auloz in the British Museum, and it is by no means certain that they really belong together. What, then, can be learned from the typical bone fragment, with four finger-holes? An example c. 150 mm. long is shown in plate 65, based on the late Hellenistic Fragment D from the Athenian Agora (Landels 1964: 397-8). This represents part of the simple form of the instrument shown in fifth-century vase-paintings being played by amateurs and hetaerae. From these illustrations it is clear that a section of this type came below the bulb or bulbs normally shown at the mouthpiece end of the instrument. There does not seem to have been any consistency in the choice of upper end for spigot and lower for socket, or vice versa, though almost certainly the sections of any one instrument would be the same in this respect. Hole I is obviously the index-finger hole sounding the highest note, and there is a socket at that end of Fragment D; but Fragment H must be the lower extremity of another instrument, and it has a spigot at its upper end. Below a section of the Fragment D type there would normally be one or two more sections, the adjoining one containing the last finger-hole (IV, stopped by the little finger) and, usually, a vent-hole which sounded the lowest of the six notes in the scale obtainable. The Brauron aulos is the only certain case in which both the sections are preserved; there is another possible example in Corinth (Wegner 1963 :32). Even without the lower section, it is possible to make a guess at the pitch of the upper four notes of the scale. The principal factor in determining this is the length of the air column between the tip of the reed and the nearest open hole. Since it is clear from surviving bulbs that the bore inside them did not expand, but remained straight throughout the instrument, we can posit a hypothetical length x between the top end of the section (A) and the tip of the reed, having the same internal diameter as the surviving piece; this, when added in turn to the distance from A-I, A-T, A-II and A-III, will give a set of four resonant lengths. The frequencies of the notes produced would be inversely proportional to these lengths, and if the four frequencies stand in ratios to each other which make some kind of sense in terms of known ancient Greek intervals, then it is possible that the supposed value for x is approximately right. This value may be arrived at by either of two methods, (a) by making an estimate, based on the length of A-B, of the probable length of two bulbs and the extruding part of the reed, or (b) by positing a given interval between two particular holes, and calculating the length x required to produce that interval. For example, one could posit a fourth (frequency ratio 4 : 3) between holes I and II; x could then be found from the equation x+(distance À to I) x + (distance A to IT) = If it were then found that other intervals were recognizable (e.g. II-III in the ratio 9 : 8, a major tone) then some confidence could be placed in the estimate of x. This purely mathematical method has been used to make calculations of the scales of some auloi; but though it is superficially attractive, it cannot be regarded as anything more than an approximative procedure (Landels 1968). It rests on the assumption that

7. G. Landels the reed could have been perfect, and perfectly matched to the resonator, and it takes no account of certain factors which in practice affect the pitch of all the notes. These are: (a) End correction. The Rayleigh formula ( +.3d) is adequate for a rough check, but is not accurate when added to the measurement from the centre of a lateral hole. (b) Variations in temperature and humidity in the player’s breath. The effect of these is approximately, but not exactly, the same on all the notes. (c) The drag effect of the constant (non-oscillating) air current through the instrument. (d) The complex and very powerful effects of the reed structure, breath pressure and embouchure control. In the imperfect world of real wood-wind instruments, there is no such thing as a reed which does not have its own quirks and resonances, or a player who does not, on occasion, pull the pitch of the instrument up or down, by accident or fatigue or over-enthusiasm. Though it is not likely that the instrumentmaker would deliberately bore the holes to give a false pitch, it must be remembered that there was virtually no standardization and certainly no mass-production of instruments, many of which would have been custom-made for an individual player. These and other matters are referred to in my interim account of the aules now in the Museum of Greek Archaeology, Reading University (Landels 1968) (plate 66). If a section of this type is all that remains of an aulos, only the most speculative and tentative suggestions can be made about the pitch of the other two notes in the scale. It does appear that on some more complete instruments the scale divides at the centre, and has a compass of about a seventh — in the terms of ancient Greek music, two conjunct tetrachords. If this could be firmly established as the norm, it would help greatly in assessing the pitch of the lowest note when the lower section is lost, or in confirming that it really ‘belongs’ when it is preserved. Another method has been employed in the reconstruction of scales from incomplete instruments which must — unfortunately, since it gave promise of interesting results — be rejected. It was based on the theory of Kathleen Schlesinger (1939) regarding aulos scales according to which the holes in the aulos were all equally spaced, with the result that no two intervals in the scale were exactly alike; in descending order each was slightly smaller than the one before, giving a pattern of this type: highest note | frequency 78 89 1 910 I 10:11 lowest note | 1112 12:13 13:14 If this were really true, it would be possible to reconstruct a complete aulos from only two data — the distance between any two holes, and the number of equal fractions into which the instrument was divided (the ‘modal determinant’). To criticize Schlesinger’s lengthy and elaborate arguments would require an extended article; suffice it to say in very brief (and therefore dogmatic) summary that her evidence was largely taken from musical cultures other than ancient Greek, that she seriously misinterpreted some of the literary evidence, and that she succeeded in accommodating only one surviving instrument — one of the Elgin aulot — to her theory. Moreover, in

The reconstruction of ancient Greek auloi order to do this she found it necessary to use a single beating reed, for which the ancient evidence is not adequate. Accordingly, the reconstructions of the Meroé aulot by N. B. Bodley (1946), based on the Schlesinger principles, cannot be accepted as valid. So far we have discussed only the pitch of the notes; when it comes to re-creating the tone or timbre of an aulos, the problems are still more acute (MacGillivray 1961). There is no modern instrument which combines, as the aulos did, a double reed with a cylindrical bore. Any reed designed for a modern instrument has been endowed, by a long process of trial and error, with exactly the right characteristics which will combine with the resonator to produce the right tone. As a result, it will tend to impart to a facsimile of an aulos something of that tone quality. A bagpipe drone reed, which is ‘wrong’ in that it is a single reed, but convenient because its stem is of about the right size, gives an aulos replica a single-reed sound like that of a bagpipe drone, and slightly reminiscent of a clarinet. The same facsimile played with a cor anglais reed produced a sound spectrum (analysed from a tape-recording) not unlike that of a cor anglais. When a bassoon reed was used, the tone was harsher and louder - again, not unlike that of a badly-played bassoon. A further disadvantage of the last two reeds was that they were badly mis-matched to the resonator, with the result that the pitch was very unstable, and could be raised or lowered at will by as much as a tone. The aulos, in its day, had a special reed of its own, carefully designed and (no doubt) often modified to give subtle effects of tone and dynamics, capable of the great variety of styles needed to match the great variety of musical contexts in which it was played. To re-create such a reed is no easy matter. 14.V.1980 Department of Classics University of Reading References Becker, H. 1966. Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der antiken und mittelalterlichen Rohrblattinstrumente = Schriftrethe das Musikwiss. Inst. der Univ. Hamburg, 4. Hamburg: Hans Sikorski. Bodley, N. B. 1946. The auloi of Meroë. American Journal of Archaeology. 50:217-40. Howard, A. A. 1893. The aulos of tibia. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 4:1-60. Landels, J. G. 1963. The Brauron aulos. Annual of the British School at Athens. 58:116-9. Landels, J. G. 1964. Fragments of auloi found in the Athenian Agora. Hesperia. 33 :392-400. Landels, J. G. 1968. A newly discovered aulos. Annual of the British School at Athens. 63:231-8. MacGillivray, J. A. 1961. The cylindrical reed pipe from antiquity to the 2oth century. In Music, Libraries and Instruments, pp. 218-20. (eds U. Shrimpton and G. Oldbury). London: Heinrichsen. Schlesinger, K. 1939. The Greek aulos. London: Methuen. Ward-Perkins, J. and Claridge, A. 1976. Pompei AD 79. London: Royal Academy. Wegner, M. 1963. Griechenland = Musikgeschichte in Bildern. 2 (4). Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag fiir Musik.

7. G. Landels Abstract Landels, 3. G. The reconstruction of ancient Greek auloi In this article, the four main problems involved in reconstructing ancient Greek auloi are discussed, namely (1) the remains are incomplete, damaged, and not a representative sample, (2) theoretical calculations from resonant lengths do not take account of the vagaries of reeds or playing techniques, (3) Schlesinger’s theory of equidistant holes is not supported by good evidence, and (4) the tone quality of the instrument cannot be reproduced without accurate knowledge of the reed construction.