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About Ankh: Sound Of Ancient Egypt
Product Description 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. Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt is a contribution to giving a voice to the vivid images of a dynamic musical culture. Amazon.com This album is based on a challenging idea: Try to recreate a musical form from a culture and period that left behind no recordings or musical notation, using only history, a description of the instruments, and some historical artifacts. It takes intuition as much as scholarship and craftsmanship to recreate the ancient instruments of Egypt--from simple percussion and flutes to boat-shaped and triangular harps and trumpets. Atherton, with his musicians and singers, exhibits both innovation and skill, offering not so much a look at how the music actually was, but more an intuitive guess at how it might have been, keeping the music first and history a close but well-heeled second. It can be frantic one moment and somber the next, as each of these lengthy song suites develops organically around a song or a piece of poetry--offering both early music and improvisational music aficionados something unique. Excellent recording quality is augmented by well-documented notes on history and instrumental research. --Louis Gibson About the Artist Multi-instrumentalist Michael Atherton composed and produced this recording. He is an internationally traveled performer, composer, author of books on musical instruments, an accomplished composer for the screen, and writes chamber music. Since 1993, he has served as a Foundation Professor at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. The artists featured on this extraordinary reconstruction of the sound of ancient Egypt include some of Australia's finest musicians, including Michael Atherton, Mina Kanaridis, Philip South and Greg Hebblewhite. Mary Demovic provides spoken word and the chorus is comprised of Maria Campbell, Angela Shrimpton, Stephen Clark, and Hasan Shanal. Using visual records, Atherton gathered and adapted a variety of similar instruments from various cultures (Greek, Turkish, Indian, Egyptian, etc.) to recreate the sound of ancient Egypt. These include: sambuca (boat-shaped harp), a trigon (angle harp), auloi (double-oboes), a shawm to simulate a T
