Sounds Wild and Broken, page 22
The next day I try again and hit the spot. A wheezy, high-pitched whistle. A sharp sound, focused and insistent.
I’ve also prepared a second flute, this one made from the ulna of the turkey vulture. It is the same length but twice as wide, almost as fat as my index finger. Ten bone nodules run along one side, the attachments for some of the vulture’s wing feathers. This bone feels better on my lip, and I quickly find a tone. With a strong puff from my mouth, a loud, single pitch flows out. It’s high and as I play around, I discover another, slightly lower one that pops out with a gentler breath, but this is a slippery note, hard to catch and hold. These two sounds are pitched like the higher octaves of a modern flute. There are no low mellow sounds.
We should expect as much. Flutes work by enclosing within themselves a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon, a stationary wave. This air pressure wave inside a flute is like an ocean wave frozen in time, one that transmits to the rest of the ocean the form of its crests and troughs. In the flute, the crests and troughs are air molecules that oscillate at the flute’s ends, but they are unmoving in the center of the flute’s bore, a still point where pressure flowing from each end is exactly balanced. As long as the player keeps blowing, the wave holds steady. The pulsing air molecules at the end of the tube push onto those outside, sending sound into the world. The length and thus frequency of the enclosed sound wave are determined by the length of the flute. Stubby flutes like my turkey-vulture bones create short waves that we hear as high-pitched notes.
Each flute is therefore a vessel that captures and holds what is normally fleeting, the human breath and sound waves in air. Breath is understood in many cultures as the foundation of life. The first discovery of the flute’s properties must have been stunning: Spirit briefly held, shaped, and sent into the world. In this age before machines, likely the cave-enclosed flute was also one of the loudest sounds the Aurignacians heard, awesome in its power.
My turkey-vulture bone flutes are about the length of a short pen, just thirteen centimeters. A Western concert flute is five times longer, a piccolo more than twice as long. When I plugged these dimensions in the relevant equations, the lowest sound coming from my flutes should be about 1,200 hertz. The lowest note on the Western concert flute is 262, middle C. The turkey-vulture flute has a shrill voice.
Wind instruments, though, do not conform to simple predictive equations, especially not equations that treat them as mere tubes. The swirling, pulsing flow of air is shaped by the details of the instrument’s form and how it is played. The angle and sharpness of the edge that meets our breath alter the crispness and pitch of the sound. Flare at either end of the flute, curvature within the bore, or interior imperfections can choke, squeeze, or expand the sound waves within. The keenness of finger-hole edges and the placement of the holes themselves rework the sound. The player brings the shape and skill of their body into relationship with the instrument. End- and side-blown flutes have no fipple to direct the air flow from mouth to instrument, as do penny whistles and recorders. Instead, the player uses lips, tongue, facial muscles, and teeth not only to precisely direct a fine stream of air to the flute’s edge but also to sculpt the sound with subtle oral changes. This embouchure interacts with the rhythms and forcefulness of the player’s lungs and diaphragm to create music. If flutes were the simple tubes described in elementary physics textbooks, musicians would not need to spend years working on their craft.
I’m no flutist. I bring unschooled embouchure and breath to the bone edge of the flutes that I’ve made. What would a professional make of the Paleozoic instruments?
Writing about what drew her to work with replicas of ancient flutes, Anna Friederike Potengowski says she felt a bit lost with her work in contemporary music. She sought an experience of roots, of beginnings. With bone and ivory replicas made by Friedrich Seeberger and Wulf Hein, experts in Paleolithic reconstruction, she set out to explore the sonic possibilities of Paleozoic bone and ivory. Seeberger’s and Hein’s artisanal and research efforts informed much of what we know about how the flutes were made. Potengowski took this experimentation into the sonic realm.
I slide headphones over my ears and enter a space of sonic imagination. We cannot know for sure how the ancient flutes sounded, but these recordings open our senses to possibility. Sound works its power, carrying ideas and emotions from one consciousness to another. Potengowski’s playing is not time travel but rather offers experimental connections across the divide that separates us from ancient people. All of the dozens of her sound samples and compositions are modern imaginings, but a few surely capture the edges of musical innovations from long ago.
The artifacts do not disclose to the eye how they were played. But experienced mouths, facial muscles, and lungs can teach us what the eyes cannot discover. Two methods of playing seemed possible to Potengowski. In the first, she blew a tight stream of air from closely pursed lips across the top of the cut bone, almost whistling across its end. To direct the air without lips getting in the way, she held the body of the flute at an oblique angle, somewhat like a Middle Eastern ney flute. The second method worked only on notched flutes. Holding the flute vertically, with the unnotched end against her lower lip, she blew across the top of the flute, hitting the notch with a stream of breath from lips slightly parted in a horizontal smile. This is like the embouchure used for notched wooden and bamboo flutes such as the Andean quena.
Given that notches are widespread in modern flutes, she expected the second method to be more successful. The notch creates a sharp edge that slices the narrow stream of air, causing the stream to fibrillate, rapidly alternating its flow on either side of the edge. This air-against-edge is also the principle used in pipe organs, recorders, and many whistles. But Potengowski found that playing the notches on the Paleolithic flutes gave sounds that were, at best, indistinct. The notch on the mammoth-ivory flute gave warm but blurry sounds. Despite much effort, the notch on the griffon vulture flute would not evoke a clear sound, only wheezy puffs. The notches on these flutes, then, may be artifacts of breakage. Or their fragmentary state may distort our idea of the original shapes.
The oblique method of playing, though, worked for all the flutes. The first time Potengowski put the swan radius to her lips using this method, her breath woke two simultaneous notes from the instrument. Two equally strong waves coexisted within the flute, one a harmonic of the other. The effect is a fulsome sound, one that offers a taste of tonal harmony rather than a single pitch. This is unusual for a flute, an instrument that normally plays one predominant pitch at a time. Potengowski thought that the sound must indicate a “mistake” in her approach. She quickly changed her opinion and came to appreciate the double tones as “wonderful and a tool for musical expression.” Multitoned sounds were perhaps one of the foundations of Paleolithic music.
Single tones, too, have curious properties in these instruments. From the swan radius came a crisp whistle. Potengowski then slid the whistle up a full octave, then back down, a smooth incline of pitch changes. The sound is a little like a modern piston whistle, swooping up and down. But there’s no slider in these flutes changing the pitch. She used nothing but the shape of her tongue, facial muscles, and lips, a technique she termed the oral glissando. This glissando works only with the oblique playing method, with the flute’s end held against pursed lips. Potengowski found that the glissando was better at changing pitch than were the finger holes cut into the flutes.
The mammoth-ivory flute, when played on its notch, is obnoxious, a shrill squeak. I find it hard to listen to the whole thirty-second track without lunging to turn the volume down. When she plays the instrument with the oblique method, though, the tone is gorgeous. The low sounds are like a distant train whistle, the higher ones like a sweet piping note from a bird.
Like all wind instruments, the flutes can be overblown to find higher registers by increasing the force of the breath. Potengowski found that she could readily make all three flutes leap like this, giving each a range of about two and a half octaves. The highest notes, pitched close to the highest possible on the piano keyboard, were the hardest for her to create and their unpleasantly piercing sound wavers as her breath pushes the instrument to its highest limit.
Potengowski’s work shows that our explorations must leave behind modern preconceptions. The bird-bone and mammoth-ivory flutes may look to us like close kin of contemporary wooden and tin flutes, but this visual similarity is deceiving. Pitch changes from these modern analogs come mostly from changes in fingering. The breath energizes and shapes this sound, but it is not the main source of the melody. For the Paleolithic replicas, Potengowski found the reverse. Fingering had only a modest effect on pitch, but by changing her mouth and breath, she could evoke any tone within the instrument’s range and thus play in any scale.
What might be learned from further experimentation with replicas of Paleolithic flutes? After reading of their work and listening to sound samples, I contacted Hein and Potengowski. We agreed that a new experimental reconstruction of a mammoth-ivory flute would be an interesting avenue for research. The replica that Hein had crafted and Potengowski played was a copy of the ancient flute from the cave. But the Paleolithic flute appears to be broken at one end, suggesting that it originally was longer. An uncarved stave that looks like a blank for a flute has been recovered from the same cave deposits as the flutes. This stave is longer than the ancient flute—thirty centimeters for the stave and only nineteen for the flute—again suggesting that the artifact from the cave is a broken part of a longer original. Hein works on archaeological reconstruction projects for museums all across Europe, and had on hand a piece of mammoth ivory from a previous project. He agreed to construct a new mammoth-ivory flute matching the Paleolithic stave’s length.
Hein’s videos of the manufacturing process reveal the material properties of mammoth ivory. To human hands, the ivory is hard and impossible to scratch, let alone cut into. But the edge of a flint tool slices readily, scoring the surface or gouging shavings like a metal plane skimming over soft wood. Watching his hands at work, I realized that stone tools not only made the work of Paleolithic people faster and more precise, but it allowed them to craft substances that are otherwise entirely beyond our capacity. The technological distance between our bare-handed ancestors and those who invented stone tools seems far wider than the gap between Paleolithic and modern metal tools.
Hein built the instrument with seven finger holes, their spacing matching those on the longer bird-bone flutes. This is not so much a replica as a hypothesis about the form of a longer mammoth-ivory flute. Once the flute was complete, Hein sent it to Potengowski for further sonic explorations. As with the other ivory flutes, the oblique method of playing worked best, directing a narrow stream of air to the top edge of the instrument. The timbre and frequency range were similar to those of the other flutes but extended a little further into the lower regions. What struck me most were her descriptions of how difficult the instrument is to play. Any bodily or mental tension interfered with the sound. Cooler, wetter days were harder. Some days the instrument burst into sound; on others, sound had to be coaxed. Later, when I tried the flute, I could draw from it only occasional whistles. My ineptitude is not surprising, but Potengowski has spent most of her life playing flutes.
Perhaps musicianship was highly advanced in the Aurignacian. Long winters in ice age caves provided ample time for practice. Or maybe embouchure was different and easier in those days. Hunter-gatherers have a strong edge-to-edge bite in their front teeth, unlike the overbite of soft-mouthed agrarians. Perhaps this gave Paleolithic players better control of facial muscles and the flow of breath? It is also possible that the ivory we recovered from the caves is only part of the instrument. Strips of grass or bark may have served as reeds. If so, the instrument was not a flute but a clarinet or oboe. Scraps of plant material are unlikely to survive for tens of thousands of years, so the record of artifacts in caves cannot answer whether or not they were used. Reeds evoke sounds from pipes even in unskilled hands, offering a less arduous path than fickle flutes into tonal music. When I held a sliver of modern oboe reed against the instrument’s beveled top end, I was immediately rewarded with a loud whistle. If Paleolithic children were as enthusiastic as modern youngsters about blowing onto grass stems to make squeaky sounds, it would take only a small leap of the imagination to attach these vibrating scraps of plant material to hollow tubes.
These experiments, and Hein and Potengowski’s earlier work, show us that ancient music must be understood through bodily engagement. The instruments’ challenging embouchure, multitonal qualities, the oral glissando, and the effects of overblowing are all discoverable only by participation. These experiments open our imagination to the music of the past.
Curiously, discoveries from the Paleolithic have not greatly influenced the creative work of contemporary music. This contrasts with the discovery of Paleolithic visual art, which inspired artists and art curators in the early twentieth century. In 1937, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City put on an exhibit titled Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa, with photographs and watercolor copies of rock paintings alongside work by contemporary artists such as Paul Klee, Hans Arp, and Joan Miró. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London followed in 1948 with 40,000 Years of Modern Art. It was understood that Paleolithic art had something to contribute to the creativity of the present moment, that it lived in vital relationship with contemporary work. These connections were on vivid display in the 2019 exhibit Préhistoire, une énigme moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. There, in the works of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and dozens more, were exhibited the fruitful influences of Paleolithic artifacts on modern art. When I visited, I was taken aback by the physical juxtaposition of ancient ivory carvings and sculptural work by Henry Moore, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse. The similarities of form were astonishing.
So, too, was the absence of Paleolithic sound. Visual art from the distant past is in lively dialogue with the present. But in our leading cultural institutions: mostly silence from the deep past.
Partly, this is a result of the recency of the discoveries. The Paleolithic flutes of southern Germany were found more than a century after the first figurines and cave paintings. But flute pieces were unearthed in the 1920s from the Paleolithic layers from the Isturitz cave in southwestern France. Perhaps the fragmentary nature of these finds accounts for their failure to spark interest among contemporary composers or musicians?
Music also has difficulty traveling across deep time. Millennia later, we can see that ivory carved into a figurine is visual art. On viewing Paleolithic carvings, sculptors can immediately relate what they see to contemporary work. Twentieth-century modernists, in particular, saw parallels between Paleolithic art and cubism, minimalism, and lyrical abstraction. Although the cultural context of the original artist is lost, the objects still speak directly to us. But an ivory flute unearthed from a cave is silent. Instrumental music requires a musician to bring the art to life. Music is always ephemeral and relational, animated by the connection between instrument and player. Its essence and form cannot be captured and displayed in a collection of artifacts. Written music notation, itself an imperfect means to communicate the subtleties of sound, is a relatively recent invention, with the earliest known example from Ugaritic clay tablets of the fourteenth century BCE. The advent of electronic forms of sound making in the twentieth century also likely contributed to the disinterest among composers and players in Paleolithic instruments. Electronics gave musicians vast new powers. Compared with this, the discovery of bone flutes superficially similar to other flutes worldwide was a modest spur to imagination at best.
But Paleolithic instruments offer marvelous possibilities for living connections across time. Music’s ephemerality places the living artist at the center of discovery. Music requires the presence of an artist in active, bodily conversation with the materials and ideas left by long-dead predecessors. Experiments in Paleolithic music making will always be imperfect replicas in their form—we’ll never know the exact tones and melodies of ancient musics—but they quite literally reawaken creative processes that have slept in the rubble of caves for millennia.
Resonant Spaces
Springtime has come to southern Germany and I am sunning myself on a partly wooded slope, my back to the mouth of a cave in a limestone escarpment. In front of me is a steep incline, suffused with the aromas of reawakening wildflowers, maple and beech leaves, and grasses. The canopy cover is sparse, admitting the gentle afternoon light. From where I sit, the slope drops to a small river weaving around fields, wooded copses, and scattered buildings on a level valley floor.
The cave sits at the foot of the limestone wall, a pocket the size of a large, high-ceilinged room. Archaeologists recovered three flutes from the sediments of this cave: two swan-bone flutes and the most well preserved of the mammoth-ivory flutes. The pit from which they were removed is now backfilled with coarse stones, and its coordinates are marked with vertical strings hung from the ceiling, preserved and mapped ready for future explorations. A latticed steel fence keeps out visitors.
As I sit on the chalky soil in front of the cave entrance, a Eurasian blackcap gives me a lesson in acoustics. The small bird wings to a low branch a few meters away and looses a melody, a string of ten fast, clear notes, each one inflected up or down. After a pause, he gives a variation of the original, this one with a couple extra sweeping notes. For the next five minutes, he unspools these phrases and rests, switching among variations. The song has a rich timbre, a rapid flow of fluty notes, a performance lauded in bird field guides as one of the finest in Europe. But most striking to me today is how the sound comes alive in this space.
