Symphony of the Stones

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ancient history was not silent, so why is our study of it? The oldest-known musical instruments – bone flutes found in southern Germany – date back a little over 40,000 years. But how long humans have been making music in one form or another is a matter of great speculation. What did ‘music’ mean in the context of our Palaeolithic and Neolithic forebears? And, how did the human voice, archaeological artefacts and ancient sites themselves affect the sounds of their world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, Rolling. Symphony of the Stones, BBC World Service, start with a full mix.
0:07.0	I'm Miriam Cook and I'm both an archaeologist and a musician.
0:14.0	Raise your hands in the air and sing now.
0:19.0	In this program for the BBC World Service,
0:22.0	I want to explore the connection between those two sides of me.
0:26.1	Okay, standby to lose sounds. I want to try and understand what music and sound might have meant to our ancient ancestors.
0:34.0	Remove the musical effects.
0:36.0	To put myself in a world without guitars or keyboards.
0:39.0	Lose the guitars.
0:41.0	To understand how the earliest instruments came to be in.
0:44.4	Take out the Mando cello, too modern.
0:47.4	Without recording studios or electronic amplification.
0:50.8	No vocal effects. And put myself back to a time when my only available instruments
0:56.4	would have been my body and my voice lose the voice to understand what
1:01.7	sounds prehistoric me might have made had I been alive 40,000 years ago.
1:08.0	Kill the beat.
1:09.8	And then to write a song about it.
1:13.0	Easy, right?
1:15.0	Now, I've got one large disadvantage over other BBC World Service music documentaries in that there are obviously no
1:27.5	CDs records or MP3s I can play you from prehistoric times.
1:33.0	But you will get to hear some of this.
1:35.4	A bit of this. A bit of this. Some of this.
	...

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