Music archaeology

Music archaeology is an interdisciplinary field of study that combines musicology and archaeology. As it includes the study of music from various cultures, it is often considered to be a subfield of ethnomusicology.

According to music archaeologist Adje Both, "In its broadest sense, music archaeology is the study of the phenomenon of past musical behaviours and sounds." Music archaeologists often combine methods from musicology and archaeology. A theoretical and methodological foundation has yet to be established, and remains one of the main areas of interest for the international community of researchers.

Research goals in the field include the study of artifacts relevant to the reconstruction of ancient music, such as sound-producing devices, representations of musical scenes, and textual evidence. The archaeological analysis and documentation of such artifacts, including their dating, description, and analysis of their origin and cultural context, can improve understanding of the usage of an instrument and can sometimes enable reconstruction of functional replicas. Textual study may involve the investigation of early musical notations and literary sources.

The field has also expanded to include neurophysiological, biological, and psychological research examining the prerequisites for music production in humans.

One of the first attempts to join the two distinct disciplines of musicology and archaeology took place at the conference of the International Musicological Society at Berkeley in 1977. One of the round tables was designated "Music and Archaeology", to which were invited specialists to discuss the musical remains of ancient cultures: Bathia Bayer (Israel), Charles Boilès (Mexico), Ellen Hickmann (Egypt), David Liang (China), Cajsa S. Lund (Sweden). The main stimulus for this session was the sensational discovery of an ancient Mesopotamian musical system by Anne D. Kilmer, an Assyriologist in Berkeley. On the basis of this discovery, excavated from Ugarit, she was able to advance a decipherment and transcription into Western notation of a late Bronze Age hymn in the Hurrian language, which contained notation based on the Mesopotamian system. Prior to the conference a replica of a Sumerian lyre had been made, with the help of musicologist Richard L. Crocker (Berkeley) and instrument maker Robert Brown, and Kilmer's version of the Hurrian hymn had been recorded and released, accompanied by a carefully prepared commentary, as Sounds from Silence: Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music (LP with information booklet, Bit Enki Publications, Berkeley, 1976). At the round table in Berkeley, Kilmer explained their method of reconstruction and demonstrated the resulting sound. This was the starting point of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology, officially founded within the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) in Seoul/Korea in 1981, and recognized by the ICTM in New York in 1983 following its first meeting on current music-archaeological research in Cambridge/UK in 1982.

The ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology went on to hold international conferences in Stockholm (1984), Hannover/Wolfenbüttel (1986), Saint Germain-en-Laye (1990), Liège (1992), Istanbul (1993), Jerusalem (1994/1995, together with the ICTM-Study Group for Iconography), and Limassol, Cyprus (1996). These meetings resulted in comprehensive conference reports.

The International Study Group on Music Archaeology (ISGMA) has been founded by Ellen Hickmann and Ricardo Eichmann in 1998. The Study Group emerged from the ICTM Study Group on Music Archaeology with the objective to obtain closer cooperation with archaeologists. Since then, the ISGMA has worked continuously with the German Archaeological Institute, Berlin (DAI, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin). A new series called "Studien zur Musikarchäologie" was created as a sub-series of "Orient-Archäologie" to present the conference reports of the ISGMA, and to integrate music-archaeological monographs independent of the Study Group's meetings; it is published by the Orient Department of the DAI through the Verlag Marie Leidorf. Between 1998 and 2004, conferences of ISGMA were held every two years at Michaelstein Monastery, Music Academy of Sachsen-Anhalt (Kloster Michaelstein, Landesmusikakademie Sachsen-Anhalt), sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

In close cooperation with the Department for Ethnomusicology at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, SMB SPK, Abteilung Musikethnologie, Medien-Technik und Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv), the 5th and 6th Symposium of the ISGMA were held in 2006 respectively in 2008 at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. In friendly cooperation with the Tianjin Conservatory of Music, the 7th Symposium of the ISGMA was held in Tianjin, China, in 2010. The 8th Symposium of the ISGMA (2012) was also held in China, in Suzhou and Beijing; three more symposiums have been held since then, with Germany and China continuing to alternate as hosts.