Stone-age music

Press, 3 May 1984, Page 20

Stone-age music

Stone-age “music” can be heard on a gramophone record which has just been issued under the auspices of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The record demonstrates sound-producing devices and instruments used in the 12,000 years before the Viking era. The recordings are based on sound-producing devices from prehistoric Denmark, Norway and Sweden found in archaeological excavations. Where devices were damaged or broken reconstructions have been used.

Apart from early devices such as rattles, scrapers, bone flutes, drums and musical bows, the record includes such rare items as the “Balkakra gong” and the unique Scandinavian bronze horns,

the “lurs.” The former is a round bronze disc resting on a rounded perforated bronze frame. It is nearly 4000 years old. Two of the famous bronze horns, dating from 700 8.C., are presented both as they may have sounded as ritual cult instruments, and as modern instruments. The producer of “The Sounds of Prehistoric Scandinavia,” is the music-archaeologist Cajsa Lund, of Stockholm, herself a former bassoonist in the Malmo Symphony Orchestra. The record is part of the Musica Sveciaeantho'logy, which illustrates Swedish musical history to the twentieth century, and will eventually comprise 200 long-playing records.