Wednesday 23 January 2019

Caput Mundi - the musical





Our friend Mark and I had privileged access to the launch of a new exhibition on Monday, hosted at our beloved Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology - Sounds of Roman Egypt. It was fascinating! From the Petrie website:
The UCL Petrie Museum has one of the largest and best-documented collections of Roman artefacts in the UK, including musical instruments that are too fragile to be played today.

For this exhibition, researchers used laser scanning and computer modelling to create 3D printed replicas of the original objects in the Petrie collection, and made recordings of the instruments to reveal sounds not heard for hundreds of years.
And we even got to play some of them! - who knew that a donkey's jawbone was used as a rhythmic percussion instrument in Roman times?

Of course, despite the extensive research and transcription of papyrus and other fragmentary musical annotations and the subsequent recordings by modern musicians in the exhibition, nobody really knows how their music would have sounded - I rather hope it might sound something like this...


...or maybe not.

Sounds of Roman Egypt is on at the Petrie Museum until 22nd April 2019 - read more about the project on the blog page of the University of Kent, which contributed to the research.

4 comments:

  1. My eyes are drawn by the pair of miniature cymbals. I have no idea why.
    Anyhow, I like a bit of interaction at the museum and this sounds like fun.
    Sx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We were instructed how to play Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" on the reed pipes. I wanted to play "Mambo #5"... Jx

      Delete

Please leave a message - I value your comments!

[NB Bear with me if there is a delay - thanks to spammers I might need to approve comments]