 Ankh:
The Sound Of Ancient Egypt Michael Atherton
The project:
The catalyst for ANKH: THE SOUND OF ANCIENT EGYPT was an exhibition-Life
and Death in the Land of the Pharaohs, developed by the National
Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, The Netherlands. The exhibition
came to the Australian Museum in 1998. It provided the challenge
of producing a creative reconstruction of ancient Egyptian music
and the inspiration for a longer term research project. The first
stage of the project began with a response to the contents of
the exhibition itself, followed by a delving into the ever-increasing
output of Egyptological scholarship, to establish a broader musical
context. The big questions loomed large: what did the music sound
like? How were the instruments tuned? Was the music polyphonic?
One must proceed by conjecture and deduction, using the literary
and visual record in conjunction with an examination of surviving
instruments. The answers remain elusive, mainly gleaned from instruments
housed in museums, along with iconographic and literary evidence.
There is no surviving music notation, nor any musical theory which
might instruct one about pitch, rhythm and timbre. In approaching
the composition and performance of the music, Michael Atherton
drew on his experience in playing medieval monophony, eastern
European and Turkish folk music, as well as his participation
in intercultural music projects. Atherton primarily uses 5, 6,
and 7 note scales based on specific pitches, resulting in a combination
of Moroccan ramal mai mode and Persian afshari. He also gravitates
toward pentatonic scales and major modes. The melodies move in
small steps. The setting of the hymns is monophonic, with the
inclusion of call and response development. Sung items include
interpolated recitations, as a means of acknowledging a deep connection
between language and music.
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