Graeme Lawson (Bodley Head)
DIGGING around for old instruments and the sounds of the past is a natural obsession of music lovers. It conjures up those countless hours spent happily scouring record stores or digital archives for treasures, building up a vinyl collection or rooting out rare gems for a playlist.
For archaeologist, multi-instrumentalist and historian Graeme Lawson, it takes on a more literal meaning as well as an impressively ambitious scope. The publicity for his new book, Sound Tracks: Uncovering our musical past, promises that it relates “the whole archaeological history of music for the very first time”. If that sounds overwhelming, Lawson appears immediately as a personable guide to reassure us that leisure is a fundamental premise of his book.
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His chapters emerge like a series of vignettes, each composed around one or more musical finds. Before long, we have considered music’s bond with local traditions and imported materials (such as in the case of the Natchez Indigenous people of 18th-century southern Mississippi) and discovered examples of people everywhere repurposing daily objects like empty steel oil drums, discarded bones or clay pipes to make memorable sounds.
Lawson is an engagingly vivid narrator with a sharp eye and ear, and the breadth of his experience and expertise makes for a diverting perspective, whether he is recalling life as a young archaeology graduate, a live musician (and historian-performer) or instrument-maker. His tone is playful and persuasive, pitched to ensure that his meticulous detail is accessible – and crucially, relatable – to all curious readers.
At one point, Lawson wryly observes that “archaeologists are no strangers to disappointment”. He acknowledges the limitations of what can be preserved, whether it is an instrument’s physical form or its original sound (something he dreamily calls “the ghosts of a lost music”). Sometimes, music’s fragility is what captivates us. I was charmed by his description of sweet-sounding “tree-bark flutes”, simply crafted from springtime wood, yet deteriorating within days or even hours.
Sound Tracks isn’t much concerned with the perennial, ultimately subjective argument of what distinguishes “music” from noise, or the more contemporary rhythm and flux of genres and trends. Rather, it draws parallels in terms of the importance of music in cultures across time and place – from heartfelt serenades to ritual sacrifice.
The geography of musical discovery is fascinating too, spanning sites such as that of the wreck of the Tudor warship the Mary Rose on the UK’s south coast to a car park in Zimbabwe where archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure located a tiny key from an mbira (a traditional thumb-piano), possibly dating to the 16th or 17th century.
The Western European colonial perspective that dominates many musical finds also places limits on understanding. A bronze trumpet taken from a Pharaoh’s tomb by 20th-century British archaeologist Howard Carter proves less robust than it looked: it falls apart years later during attempts to play it to mark Carter’s death. Elsewhere, another British archaeologist, Leonard Woolley, is shown holding a Sumerian lyre from a site near Nasiriyah, now in southern Iraq. As a British Iraqi music journalist, I am dispirited rather than delighted that various Woolley “discoveries” are in the British Museum.
Sound Tracks, however, is more concerned with musicology than modern politics. As the book progresses, Lawson considers evidence that humans are “wired” for sound, observing: “At the first appearance of instruments around forty thousand years ago, their forms are if anything more elaborate and more coherent than those that succeeded them.” He leaves us asking what musical legacy we might want to gift future generations, or even other worlds: a truly elliptical end note.
Arwa Haider is a writer based in London
