Michael Atherton - Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt
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CD Details
Artist: Michael AthertonEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 1998-08-18
Music Label: Celestial Harmonies
Soundtracks:
- Atum: Creator Sun God [Song]
- Atum: Creator Sun God [Instrumental]
- Atum: Creator Sun God [Instrumental]
- Atum: Creator Sun God [Instrumental]
- Atum: Creator Sun God [Instrumental]
- Maat: Truth, Balance, Order [Song]
- Maat: Truth, Balance, Order [Instrumental]
- Maat: Truth, Balance, Order [Instrumental]
- Maat: Truth, Balance, Order [Instrumental]
- Maat: Truth, Balance, Order [Instrumental]
- Khet: The Physical Body [Song]
- Khet: The Physical Body [Instrumental]
- Khet: The Physical Body [Instrumental]
- Khet: The Physical Body [Instrumental]
- Shen: Eternity [Song]
- Shen: Eternity [Instrumental]
- Shen: Eternity [Song]
- Shen: Eternity [Instrumental]
Music reviews of Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt
Music Review: I love this cd. It's amazing.
Rating: 5 Stars
Beautifully reproduced ancient sounds of what Egyptian music may of sounded like. Something about it pulled me right in without even thinking I said, "I have to have this." and then bought it. I cherish it.
Description of Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt
The catalyst for Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt was an exhibition - Life and Death in the Land of the Pharaohs, developed by the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, The Netherlands. The exhibition came to the Australian Museum in 1998. It provided the challenge of producing a creative reconstruction of ancient Egyptian music and the inspiration for a longer term research project.The first stage of the project began with a response to the contents of the exhibition itself, followed by a delving into the ever-increasing output of Egyptological scholarship, to establish a broader musical context. The big questions loomed large: what did the music sound like? How were the instruments tuned? Was the music polyphonic? One must proceed by conjecture and deduction, using the literary and visual record in conjunction with an examination of surviving instruments. The answers remain elusive, mainly gleaned from instruments housed in museums, along with iconographic and literary evidence. There is no surviving music notation, nor any musical theory which might instruct one about pitch, rhythm and timbre.
In approaching the composition and performance of the music, Michael Atherton drew on his experience in playing medieval monophony, eastern European and Turkish folk music, as well as his participation in intercultural music projects.
Atherton primarily uses 5, 6, and 7 note scales based on specific pitches, resulting in a combination of Moroccan ramal mai mode and Persian afshari. He also gravitates toward pentatonic scales and major modes. The melodies move in small steps. The setting of the hymns is monophonic, with the inclusion of call and response development. Sung items include interpolated recitations, as a means of acknowledging a deep connection between language and music.
Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt is a contribution to giving a voice to the vivid images of a dynamic musical culture.
This album is based on a challenging idea: Try to recreate a musical form from a culture and period that left behind no recordings or musical notation, using only history, a description of the instruments, and some historical artifacts. It takes intuition as much as scholarship and craftsmanship to recreate the ancient instruments of Egypt--from simple percussion and flutes to boat-shaped and triangular harps and trumpets. Atherton, with his musicians and singers, exhibits both innovation and skill, offering not so much a look at how the music actually was, but more an intuitive guess at how it might have been, keeping the music first and history a close but well-heeled second. It can be frantic one moment and somber the next, as each of these lengthy song suites develops organically around a song or a piece of poetry--offering both early music and improvisational music aficionados something unique. Excellent recording quality is augmented by well-documented notes on history and instrumental research. --Louis Gibson
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