Notes
on the Gold Lyre & Silver Pipes of Ur video
Shot by Mark Harmer
I'd
like to thank Andy Lowings for his energy reproducing the lyre and bringing
everyone together, Bo Lawergren (Professor Emeritus Hunter College of
the City University of New York) for his work reproducing the silver pipes,
Simon O' Dwyer for entrusting them to me, Mark Harmer for such beautiful
video craftsmanship, and Bill Taylor for working with my last-minute composing
and condensation issues so gracefully (we did not have Mesopotamian temperatures
in the church). SCALE TUNING.
Bo Lawergren's
reproduction of the silver pipes dictated what you hear at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvgtAHV4mzw
, - more or less.
We tuned the lowest 5 lyre strings to the notes of
the pipes, the next 2 strings to perfect 5ths with strings 2 & 3, and the top
string an octave above the lowest. I could have used sharper reeds to stretch
out the intervals, or flatter reeds to bring them closer together, but this affects
the pitch of the top notes more than the bottom ones.
I settled for roughly
equal intervals - 180 cents +/- 15, or a fifth divided into five roughly equal
steps - as this is common around the Arabic world and West Africa. THE
COMPOSITION. This exploits the moving drone technique, which
I heard to great effect in Saeid Shanbehzadeh's Iranian neyjofti playing.
It is structured as follows:
0.04 Theme: pipes solo
0.24 Theme: pipes
& lyre
0.44 Var.1 (0011 0011 0011)
0.59 Var.2 (same structure)
1.13
Var.3 (Var1 up a step but 1100 edited)
1.22 Var.4 (Var.2 up a step)
1.32
Cadenza - free improv.
1.42 Theme
2.02 Theme, more florid The piece
is not based on anything in particular, I`m learning through experiment what the
silver pipes are capable of and I probably owe Mark a debt of gratitude for excising
a fluff in Var.3.
I hope to deepen my assimilation of appropriate musical grammars
and idioms considerably over the next few years and would gladly receive input
on where to go or what to listen to next. I make no claim that this is
like music of 4,000 years ago.
My approach is gradually to penetrate a rich
breadth of musical and contextual evidence - a lifetime's voyage. Barnaby
Brown October 2007
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