A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 50 PIECES
A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 50 PIECES
THE CLASSICAL MUSIC THAT SHAPES US
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For GMS and JMS.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594): 65
Missa Papae Marcelli
Maddalena Casulana (1544–1590): Il Primo Libro 69 di Madrigali
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643): L’Orfeo 73
Francesca Caccini (1587–after 1641): La liberazione 79 di Ruggiero
Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677): ‘Il Lamento’ 83
Change Ringing: The Tradition of Bell Ringing
and its Repertoires
Henry Purcell (1659–1695): Dido and Aeneas
Isabella Leonarda (1620–1704): Sonatas, Op. 16
Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665–1729):
Céphale et Procris
Roque Jacinto de Chavarría (1688–1719): ‘Fuera, 111 fuera! Háganles lugar!’
The C Major Scale
Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706): Canon in D Major
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750): St Matthew Passion
George Frideric Handel (1685–1759): Messiah
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges
(1745–1799): L’amant anonyme
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–1791): The Marriage
of Figaro
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827): Symphony No. 9
Louise Bertin (1805–1877): Fausto
Richard Wagner (1813–1883): Der Ring des Nibelungen 161
Patty and Mildred J. Hill: ‘Happy Birthday’ 169
Igor Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps 175 (‘The Rite of Spring’)
Lili Boulanger (1893–1918): Psalm 130: ‘Du fond de 183 l’abîme’ (‘From the Depths I Cry to Thee’)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958): The Lark 189
Ascending
Solomon Linda (1909–1962): ‘Mbube’ 195
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975): Symphony No. 7, 203 ‘Leningrad’
Margaret Bonds (1913–1972): The Ballad of the 211 Brown King
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007): Gruppen
Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990): West Side Story
Yoko Ono (1933–): ‘Cut Piece’
Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016): ‘Bye Bye Butterfly’,
Deep Listening
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (1923–2023):
Music for Piano
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Julius Eastman (1940–1990): ‘Stay On It’
Steve Reich (1936–): Different Trains
Meredith Monk (1942–): Atlas
Thomas Adès (1971–): America – A Prophecy
Unsuk Chin (1961–): Šu, Concerto for Sheng
and Orchestra
John Luther Adams (1953–): Become Ocean
Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023): Innocence
INTRODUCTION
A History of the World in 50 Pieces – a title from which a few questions naturally flow: whose history? whose world? whose pieces? Part of the answer, if you review the list of chapters ahead of you in this miscellany, which traces its fragmentary history through some of the music that we have made as human beings, might easily be: for all its attempts to circumnavigate global music across time, history, geography, and culture, this is a Northern-hemisphere-biased, temporally-unbalanced, myopically Western, metro-centric, ‘classical’-heavy selection that no one else on the planet apart from this writer would have come up with.
And that’s true. So, what is this collection, and what is it trying to achieve, in the context of all of those limitations?
This isn’t a history of music. Instead it’s a constellation-like history of how music shapes, and has been shaped by, the contours of what it means to be human. It’s a story revealed through the choice of a 50-part collection of pieces, each opening a window on the times and places of their creation, but
resonating further and wider with other currents of social change, politics and culture.
It’s a world that’s created through the connections across time and place of the pieces I’ve chosen so that, arranged chronologically, a composite picture emerges of how the dance between music and our species has produced some of the most powerful expressions of what it means to be human over the last few millennia, and even further back in time.
The crucial idea is what a ‘piece’ of music or classical music actually is. It’s my definition of that idea that’s guided the field of choice, from what would otherwise be a near infinity of possibility. So, in those terms, what is a ‘piece of music’? It’s something whose transmission, either in oral cultures, through the handing on of embodied tradition, or through symbolic representation as written notation, allows music both to be part of the time and place of its creation and to be independent of it. Whatever the means of their ongoing communication, pieces of music are performative practices that can be endlessly reinterpreted by communities and cultures of performers and listeners. They are musical phenomena that belong to whoever sings them, plays them, and hears them, at whatever distance of time and place to the circumstances of their creation.
This is the democratic principle of a ‘piece of music’: through whatever means they are passed on from place to place, from culture to culture, from voice to voice, and player to player, pieces of music function as musical promises that are redeemed and claimed in the future by persons and cultures unknown to their original creators. This is a magical process through time and across geography, in which future music-makers and listeners receive these pieces of music as if
they were meant for them, to be remade by them, to become theirs. Transcending time, these pieces are both inexorably tied to the context of their creation – and fly free of it.
That definition means there are things that a ‘piece of music’ isn’t: this isn’t a compendium of 50 events that have been significant for musical history, and it’s not a list of favourite recordings of songs or symphonies. The reason for this is that one-off events and fixed-in-time recordings would create a pantheon of musical and historical greatest hits, and that’s not the point of this book. It’s not only about songs that have been sung, performances that have happened, fixed in the aspic of a musical museum. Instead, this book is a cornucopia of music-making that hasn’t yet happened, as much as music that has.
The pieces of music in this book thrum and teem with the potential of the musicking that they will continue to inspire in the future, in the way they’re taken up by musical communities we don’t know yet: this music belongs to them, just as much as it belongs to us.
So what has guided the selection of the 50 pieces, and the 50 chapters? The broad ideas were not to reflect a judgement that these pieces are ‘better’ than the billions of others out there, and not to make a hierarchy of musical quality or qualities –ineluctably contested terms, contingent on who’s making the assessment, where, and when, at every stage of human history. Instead, the pieces make up a chronological sequence of music to attend to, in the biggest sense. To listen to, of course, but also to pay attention to the individual, social, political, and so many other contexts they reflect.
The self-imposed definition of ‘pieces of music’ that I’ve just outlined is occasionally expanded beyond those limits.
That’s most obviously true in the Prologue, the pre-piece era, and the songs of the humpback whale, in which we encounter the sounds of the natural world and the cosmos. The reason they’re there is that our human-made music is a subset of the songs that the Earth and the planets sing. Our interpretation of these sounds turns them into pieces of human perception that reveal other dimensions of the musical connections that bind us not only to each other but to the vibrating frequencies and energies of all matter in the universe: the piece of music of which we are all an infinitesimal part.
Yet we are an important and a joyous part of that panoply. Over millennia, our music-making has sounded the ecstatic communion of our coming together in social groups, around fires, in caves, in concert halls. Music is the sound of our love and our faith, it’s the resonance of our connection with each other, it’s a song that keeps singing across the generations in how these 50 pieces belong to us, and to our future.
And as well as the connections you might feel, from Enheduanna to Pauline Oliveros, from Hildegard of Bingen to Kaija Saariaho, there are countless gaps you will experience in the 50 chapters, as we move from Songlines to symphonies, from operas to sounds inspired by the ocean. That’s where your listening and imagination comes in: just as the pieces themselves are messages to be reinterpreted, to become things unknowable by their creators, so too is this 50-part collection an invitation to make your own journeys in your listening and music-making, to keep exploring what it means to be musical – which is the same as saying: what it means to be human.
PROLOGUE: THE PRE-PIECE ERA
The rotation of the Earth – the Laetoli footprints – the earliest instruments – the Songlines
It’s literally beneath us: under every step we take, below the range of our hearing, imperceptible unless recorded by the magic of microphones that have the sensitivity to pick it up –the sound of the rotation of the Earth.
And there is a recording of this primordial sound: on the composer and sound recordist Jez riley French’s in limitless geologies , an album that came out in 2023 after he’d been working on it for a decade, that’s what you can hear. Or rather, that’s what you feel in your solar plexus as well as perceive with your ears: the sounds of the world turning are felt as a full-body immersion, since their frequencies extend down into the realms of the infrasonic, below the threshold of our hearing, but sensed by our bodies as vibrations. You feel the pressure waves pulsing through the air on your skin; you feel your cells being shaken by these low, deep swells. When you’re experiencing the sounds of the
Earth’s rotation, they are physically churning the viscera of your body.
It’s a sound found by microphones going where human beings cannot, inside geothermal vents and fumaroles in Iceland. Between the tectonic plates of Eurasia and North America, the Earth’s skin is broken in Iceland. Jez riley French used specially designed contact microphones, placed directly on surfaces to allow us to perceive their reverberation, and geo-phones that were originally designed for oil exploration, which are turned into listening sensors for the deep underground. Plunged inside these geological wounds, they pick up the sounds of the Earth’s eastward rotation, magnetic energy transformed into sonic material.
This is the true song of the Earth: the piece that our planet has been performing for the last four and a half billion years, the sound of the living Earth. As well as the wonder of feeling these soundwaves course through your body, they are sublime, uncanny, even terrifying. They are definitely not comforting or cosseting: instead they’re a stomach-sinking abyss that feels like a confrontation between human time set against the deepest time of the spinning Earth’s life-span.
Yet, like our bodies, these sounds are alive and ever-changing. The rotation of the Earth’s song isn’t a constant underscore, but a shifting current of energy, as the Earth’s rotational axis tilts, as its speed of rotation changes, so that no day is exactly the same length as the next – our days are milliseconds longer than they were centuries ago.
Listening to these sounds from deep inside the Earth is a revelation of the cosmic essentials without which no life on Earth could survive: without its rotation, without its tides,
without its planetary dance through space. But it’s also a reminder that the music of the spheres of the solar system, of deep space, and the whole universe, are spectacularly indifferent to the timescales of our lives. They are galactic musical scores in which our lives are an infinitesimal yet interconnected part. They make the fundamental piece of music on which our lives dance, mayflies on a deep river of time.
Yet we are here: and our own bodies are constellations of frequencies of vibration, the rhythms of our limbs, our pulses, our cells and systems coursing in syncopation, and harmony, and friction; and they are the result of the other long-term dance of which we are merely the latest iteration: evolution, another of nature’s underscores upon which our lives are lived.
And to find traces of the rhythms that our hominid ancestors moved to, there is amazing evidence that was discovered in Tanzania in 1976: three sets of footprints, preserved in ancient lava-flows at Laetoli. Dating from around 3.7 million years ago, these are the footprints of three of our bipedal ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, and we can follow them for 27 metres over 70 impressions in the ash before they disappear. They are as well preserved as if they had walked on a sandy beach yesterday; the aeons shrink breathtakingly when you look at them and imagine the relationships between these three individuals: were they members of the same community, tribe, or family group?
The Laetoli footprints are the earliest tracks yet discovered of our hominid ancestors. But they are also the first proto-human musical score. The musical notation of today’s musical cultures fixes time into place with printed notes on the page. And that’s what these footprints do too. They fix and record
the time of these three Australopithecines in the landscape, 3.7 million years ago. The imprints of their feet are the first impressions of the regular pulsation of human-ancestral bodies on the earth – the first fragment of hominid-made rhythmic notation in world history. They are physically close to each other, so much so that one set of prints follows in the track of another; they are walking with a relaxed stroll, crossing what was likely a more forested landscape in their time than the environment of today’s Rift Valley. These three – either a female, a male, and a child, or two males and a female, research suggests – are caught and captured in a moment of transcendent mundanity in the middle of their lives. In his book Sound Tracks, the archaeologist Graeme Lawson asks the question whether we might one day be able to interpret these tracks to detect ‘changes in their sense of time, and timing, and rhythm: changes that would eventually take on modern symbolic meanings as music and dance?’ Yet there is much that the Laetoli tracks already reveal: scientifically, these footprints are conclusive proof that our hominid ancestors developed the ability to walk on two legs before the modern human brain evolved, and the rhythms that they already disclose amount to a kind of music that we can all recognise: our walking, the polyphony of our limbs working in concert. Without yet being able to understand their precise relationships, we can imagine the communication their voices and bodies might have created: sounds of reassurance and community, their feet making a route over this terrain for the one and only time that we can be sure they took this path, on a journey, perhaps, towards bigger family groups, to find more fertile terrain, to gather food, to survive.
So these footprints aren’t silent: all it takes is our imagination to put our contemporary Homo sapiens bodies in the place of our ancestors, to walk in their footsteps, to feel that corporeal connection over millions of years, across boundaries of species as well as time, through the sound and squelch of their feet in the ash and mud they walked through.
There can be no physical trace left of the vocal sounds that these ancestral bodies made. But the musical culture of our more recent ancestry, the Homo sapiens of tens of thousands of years ago, and the repertoires they might have made together, is within the grasp of our understanding.
In the cave system of Chauvet in the Ardèche in France, the cave paintings, made over 30,000 years ago, are shocking in their immediacy, vibrancy, skill – and their preservation. Acoustic research at Chauvet, and in other sites of cave paintings all over the world, demonstrates that where the cave art is most dense and elaborate, the resonance of the space is richest. That suggests that these were places that were chosen because of how they sounded, the way that voices echo the most powerfully and the most uncannily, not merely because painted marks would stick to the walls. And if this acoustic phenomenon was recognised and important to the community, it might have made them places of special significance for celebration, for ritual, or even for communion with otherworldly presences, sounded in the spectral echoing of their voices.
Did they mark the times of their lives, celebrate hunts, and hear mysterious reverberations of their voices in caves like these? Were they using their voices to conjure the spiritual implications of hearing their voices returning to them as if from another world? The material evidence of the paintings is
staggering, but the connection with sound-making, dancing, musicking bodies is even more spine-tingling.
And while the sounds made by the voices of early European Homo sapiens have disappeared into the echoing spaces of caves in France, Germany and Spain, we do have incontrovertible evidence of other sounds that these societies produced – in the instruments they made. At the Geißenklösterle cave in south-west Germany, bone flutes have been discovered, dating from 42–43,000 years ago. Although distant in time from us, it is still many millennia after our 300,000-year-old species first arrived in Eurasia from Africa. The bone flutes are made from the wing-bones of a vulture and a mammoth bone, and in recreations made by archaeologist Wulf Hein, it’s possible to hear the music that the bird-bone flute can make.
The flute produces sounds whose power pierces through the millennia: the technology and understanding required to produce this instrument must have built on previous generations of skills, and countless other flutes made before this example. Its five finger holes make a striking link with the pentatonic, or five-note scales that so many folk melodies all over the world are still made from, a window into the repertoire of pieces and songs this flute could have inspired and accompanied. The high register and soundworld of this instrument also makes it uniquely capable of mimicking birdsong, reproducing the sounds of the animal that gave its life to make it.
The need to make music, like the need to make cave paintings, demonstrates how the earliest European humans were engaged in remaking and rethinking their world through cultures that were about much more than survival. They were capable of symbolic representation of the world around them, conceiving
and re-conceiving their lives in ways that our modern musical cultures continue, and to which they are connected.
And where there were flutes, there was also clearly much more that we haven’t yet found. The Geißenklösterle flutes are only exceptional because of their discovery: they are among the earliest that we modern humans have found, but they are far from the first instruments ever made. Not least because, in the Divje Babe cave in Slovenia, a carved bear femur has been claimed as evidence of Neanderthal music instrument manufacture, dating from 50–60,000 years BC.
Another human-made flute fragment from 110,000 years ago, a single hole carved in a tiny curve of bone, from the Haua Fteah cave in Libya, is currently the oldest constructed evidence of instrument-making we have, showing just how early in the history of Homo sapiens instrumental music developed – and that fragment itself is only a tiny piece of the iceberg of our human musicking.
And yet it’s not only in artefacts – we don’t have to look through archaeological digs. We can listen to song-makers in Australia to hear the most ancient continuous tradition of song-making on our planet: the Songlines of the First Peoples of Australia. With a history stretching back 65,000 years, there are records in these songs of events that are confirmed by archaeology and geology, shifts of climate and territory and terrain, as well as the trauma of the recent history of Australia’s colonisation. The vast repertoire of Songlines are a living record of those networked pasts and presents, and they are among the most precious, most complex, and most awe-inspiring phenomena that human minds and bodies have ever created. Held as an ongoing oral tradition, Songlines are
simultaneously a repertoire, a means of map-making and way-faring, a living history of myth, metaphor and physical reality, and a chart of the interconnectedness of the human, the animal, the landscape and the cosmos.
The Songlines’ sheer physics are enough to blow the minds of any modern human: especially Western-influenced minds for whom knowledge, instead of a corporeal resource of feeling and being, is a commodity to be bought and sold, and for whom the ideology of technological progress means our digital maps and our digitally-produced songs in our present tense must be the most efficient, the most useful, the most complete.
That’s a delusion. The Songlines are arguably the most sophisticated system of embodied knowledge ever developed, and they come not from technology but from the ancestors, and from the earth. Practically speaking, Songlines are, in part, about navigation, enabling travel from one side of the continent of Australia to the other. If you know the songs, you can journey safely from the east to the west of Australia, thanks to the symbiotic relationship between the songs and the land. The land is sung into being, and the song harbours the future of your journey through the landmarks you see, the rivers you cross, the animals who share the landscape with you, the collective history of your ancestors’ relationship with these places. The Seven Sisters Songline – a creation myth based on the Pleiades constellation – crosses the entire continent, a Songline that individual communities have responsibility for preserving, for singing the part of the story that relates to their place and their own history, their chain in a 2,500-milelong piece of collective memory and music. The Seven Sisters Songline is arguably the longest, grandest and most significant
piece of human-made music, storytelling and cultural knowledge that’s ever been created. Other Songlines are made for particular people and specific locations, with information on where water and food can be found and harvested. Sung by single voices, and in community, with repeated melodic figures and rhythmic patterns, sometimes using sticks on the ground as percussion, the landscape and the history of a continent can be sung into being.
Yet the Songlines aren’t a fixed repertoire, an absolute order of words and sounds that simply needs to be learnt by rote and handed down through the generations – epic enough as even that idea is. The store of memory that the Songlines contain and reflect is astounding, but still more remarkable is the ever-changing quality of the songs, how they are sung, and who sings them. That has meant a period of horrifying fragility in their recent history, when the colonisation of Australia initiated policies of cultural extermination, which could have cleared the world of its Songlines. Yet the collective memory across fractured and ravaged communities of indigenous peoples persisted, and the Songlines today are – at last – celebrated, and appreciated, their unique contribution to human history recognised.
The Songlines reveal the truth that a place – any place – is multi-dimensional in time, space, memory and meaning, and they are the most complete way that human cultures have ever developed of singing those deep relationships into being. The Songlines principle is transformative because it’s relational: their performance enacts a relationship with place, with the past, with the interdependence of all living things, in which the singer in the present tense is simply another dot in time,
one point among an infinite number that coalesce and collide with one another, arcing back to the aeons of the first singers of the Songlines – who, in indigenous wisdom, emerge at the same time as the Earth, being indivisible from it, as we all are. Communities handing tradition on in a never-ending chain of musical present-tenses through each generation: all musical cultures are, at least in part, oral traditions, and all are the work of the collective effort of whole populations. Who came up with the first Songline? Gods, animals, the earth itself: human individuals are less important than the communal ownership of the Songlines, in their performance, preservation and transformation.
Even if we are not all privileged to be singers of Songlines in Australia, we are all connected by the same principle, singing and sharing the Songlines of our own lives, the courses they run in space and time, in sound and song – and in the 50 pieces that follow in this book.
PIECE #1
ENHEDUANNA
HYMNS
Ur, Mesopotamia, c. 2300 BC
Continents to the west, leaping across centuries, we find the first creative work in the human imagination that has a single named author.
She is Enheduanna, high priestess of the city of Ur in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. 45 of her poems survive on cuneiform tablets, mostly written for separate temples in the Akkadian Empire. These lyrics were designed to be performed as part of a thriving musical, spiritual and ritual culture as contemporary iconography and evidence shows. These poems were hymns performed in honour of the moon deity she worshipped, Nanna, in the twenty-fourth century BC.
Enheduanna’s lineage was aristocratic. She was a princess, the daughter of the Emperor Sargon the Great, and part of a society in Mesopotamia that can claim the first literary language, and the first modern empire. The politics were part of the poetry and the songs. Enheduanna’s lyrics are designed to fuse together the cults of the primary deities of the northern and southern regions of Mesopotamia that Sargon ruled over, Ishtar and Inanna.
Enheduanna belonged to a culture of striking equality of the sexes in all aspects of society, from work to property rights to visibility in religious ritual, and the poems attributed to her put images of female power front and centre in their storytelling. In one of the poems, Inanna fights Ebih, a person-
ification of an entire mountain range. She makes the landscape collapse, and in the final encounter with Ebih, Enheduanna’s poem reads: Inanna ‘sharpened both edges of her dagger. She grabbed Ebih’s neck as if ripping up esparto grass. She pressed the dagger’s teeth into its interior. She roared like thunder. The rocks forming the body of Ebih clattered down its flanks.’
Not only war-like, the songs are also paeans of praise for the Mesopotamian landscape, and, above all, for the process of composing these lyrics. ‘The Exaltation of Inanna’ is a raw and devastating poem to her Goddess that was written in human terror and divine faith after Enheduanna had been forced out of the city of Ur: ‘I am dying / that I must sing / this sacred song’. In it, she also claims and celebrates her authorial role: ‘I have given birth / Oh exalted lady, (to this song) for you / That which I recited to you at (mid)night / May the singer repeat it to you at noon!’
The question is what that singer would have sounded like, and what instruments they might have played. We know that Mesopotamian musical culture before the time of Enheduanna included flutes, played by women, as well as harps, drums and other wind instruments. A lamentation prayer from around 2000 BC bewails the destruction of Sumer’s cities, and the end of ‘sweet-sounding musical instruments such as the lyre, drum, tambourine, and reed pipe; no comforting songs and soothing words from the temple singers and priests’. Other depictions of religious music-making show female musicians playing the balaĝ, a lyre-like instrument, which was associated with the goddess Ninigizibara.
Enheduanna’s songs were copied dozens of times after her lifetime; the structure and expression of her temple hymns
were a vital influence for centuries on future composers and writers. The texts survive, but the sounds that would have accompanied these songs in temples and across Mesopotamian culture need to be reimagined from the representation of musical instruments and religious performance on reliefs and the images carved on cylinder seals.
Yet Enheduanna’s legacy lives on, in the work of every composer, author and artist who has signed their own work for the last four and a half millennia. At the end of her last temple hymn, Enheduanna reveals herself, and claims her work as her own: ‘the person who bound this tablet together is Enheduanna / my king / something never before created / did not this one give birth to it’. And in those words, she jumps across the aeons to speak to every creative artist who has lived and worked and claimed their compositions in word and music as their own.
PIECE #2 THE ORESTES FRAGMENT
Greece, c. 200 BC
The iconography of Ancient Greek music and its enormous instrumentarium, like the aulos – a double-pipe instrument, played with one pipe in each hand – the lyres, the cytharas, the drums and percussion, in celebration, in ritual, and in daily life, seems like a musical treasure trove. But finding evidence for what they actually sounded like, and the music they actually played and which their voices sang, has proved speculative at best, and a fool’s errand at worst. In 1932, Wilfrid Perrett reported the scholarly view that: ‘Nobody has ever made head or tail of ancient Greek music, and nobody ever will. That way madness lies’.
But the twenty-first century has found revelation where previous generations thought there could only be silence and confusion. That’s thanks to research led by Armand D’Angour, who has worked on the fragments of musical notation that survived from a period in history in which no written evidence is usually thought to be translatable into sound. Not true: there are around 60 fragments from Ancient Greece that show indications not only of rhythm and pitch, but melody and expression.
And D’Angour’s essential point is that everything we call poetry in the Ancient World, from Homer to Sappho, was made – composed – as a text to be sung, and to be performed with instrumental accompaniment. The rhythmic feet of Greek
poetry is a meter not only of words, but of sound and rhythm: the hexameter, the six-beat pattern of Homer’s Iliad, is already a proto-music, a swing of accents strong and soft, a pattern of rhyme that suggests its own speech melody.
But mere speech wouldn’t have been enough for Homer or for any of the Greek poets or writers. They weren’t only composers of texts, but creators and inspirers of music. The musicologist Stefan Hagel has reconstructed the four-note lyre that Homer used, and his improvised performances of the Iliad are a window into what these texts were meant to sound like. To hear them only as words would have been to experience only part of their meaning and expression. D’Angour’s research, and the work of virtuosic musicologists, instrument-builders and performers, gives us a viscerally noisy sense of what we have all been missing in our understanding of Ancient Greek culture.
And when you hear a performance of the most important fragment of notation that survives – a passage from Euripides’ Orestes , originally written in 408 BC, in which the chorus describe Orestes being chased by the Furies conjured by his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he has murdered – the Ancient world jumps thrillingly into our time. This moment from Euripides’ ancient tragedy, preserved on a torn fragment of papyrus from around 200 BC, just a couple of inches square, becomes a contemporary soundscape.
Thanks to the virtuosity of Barnaby Brown, playing the aulos, in the first performances of this piece since the fifth century BC, in Oxford in 2017, the voices of the chorus are quickened by a repeated phrase on the pipes that’s perfectly descriptive of this terrifying hunt, and impossible to get out of your head when you’ve heard it. The Orestes fragment is a piece