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Music Archaeology in Scandinavia, 1800–1990

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Music Archaeology in Scandinavia, 1800–1990 MUSIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN SCANDINAVIA, 1800–1990 CAJSA S. LUND In 1797 the first discovery of Scandinavian Bronze Age horns, the so called lurs, was made in Denmark. Naturally, a great deal of attention has been devoted to these impressive instruments, which are approximately three thousand years old. Up to the 1960s, these lurs were usually discussed in Scandinavian archaeological specialist literature as if they were the only preserved remnants of prehistoric music in Northern Europe. Several sporadic, pioneering studies of other sound-making instruments were also completed early on. However, it was not until the 1970s that a more systematic approach to research on music and other “cultural sounds” in Scandinavia’s prehistory began, under the name “music archaeology.” What had started with a handful of international individuals, including the author, soon grew into a group of researchers, which have laid the foundation for the field of music archaeology today. The history of the term “music archaeology” is summarised in an appendix. To Ellen Hickmann, friend and colleague “The Phenomenal Bronze Lurs” was the heading, with ironic understatement, of a paper in 1987 stating that, although studies of music in Scandinavia’s prehistory have appeared occasionally since the middle of the nineteenth century, the so called lurs were for more than one hundred and fifty years regarded as almost 177 178 CAJSA S. LUND synonymous with prehistoric music in the Scandinavian countries (Lund 1987, 9). It was not until the 1970s that a more comprehensive and systematic approach to research began—and this was in Sweden—on music and other non-linguistic sounds (even whole soundscapes) in prehistoric societies in Scandinavia. This was thus a field to which relatively sporadic attention had been devoted earlier, apart from the bronze lurs. The field was given the name “music archaeology,” in Swedish musikarkeologi, a term that people in professional circles in Sweden thought was newly coined in their country. Music archaeology (the very first English version was “musical archaeology”) was soon given its own platform in Stockholm. This meant, among other things, greater possibilities for the active creation of international contacts. Thus, early on Sweden became an important meeting place for the relatively few researchers from abroad who at that time combined musicology and prehistoric archaeology. Even the term “music archaeology” itself started to be introduced to the world at large. This paper is a summary of the background and development of music archaeology in Scandinavia up to around 1990, albeit with a focus on Sweden, including the history—as known to the present author—of the term “music archaeology” and its international variants. For a more Pan-European survey of music archaeology from a historiographical perspective, with references also to non- European high Classical cultures, I would like to refer the reader to an article by J. V. S. Megaw (Megaw 1988, 343–53), Albrecht Schneider’s comprehensive study (Schneider 1986, 195–224), and to basic articles by Ellen Hickmann (Hickmann 1983/84, Hickmann 1985, Hickmann 2006). Let me add here, that Scandinavia in this paper means the Nordic countries Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Scandinavia’s prehistory is customarily divided into the Stone Age (ca. 10,000–1800 BC), the Bronze Age (ca. 1800–500 BC) and the Iron Age (ca. 500 BC–1050 AD). The so called Viking Age (ca. 800–1050 AD) is the last period of Scandinavia’s prehistory. The boundary between prehistoric times and the next period, the Middle Ages, is naturally flexible. Standard archaeological practice places it at 1050 AD for South Scandinavia up to and including the counties of central Sweden. In the more northern parts of Scandinavia, the transition occurred much later. MUSIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN SCANDINAVIA, 1800–1990 179 A GRAND OVERTURE In the year 1797 a letter was received at the Royal Treasury in Copenhagen stating that a farmer had found six curved metal horns in a bog called Brudevaelte (Fig. 1). Six years later (1803) it was reported that two similar metal horns had been found in another bog in Denmark. The horns turned out to be cast in bronze and were assumed to be very old. The Danish archaeologist C. J. Thomsen (who proposed the Three-Age system, for which he is remembered internationally), was the first person who could date these, and a number of other bronze horns that were found in the early nineteenth century, to the period he called the Bronze Age. And in 1836 he also gave them a name: lur (Thomsen 1836). Thomsen was clearly inspired by the luĀr of old Islandic literature, an occasionally mentioned but hitherto unidentified wind instrument (Broholm 1965, 12). At the end of the nineteenth century a total of twenty five lurs had been found. Researchers were thus confronted early on with a whole group of ancient instruments that seemed to reveal an unexpected, highly developed music culture of our early ancestors about three thousand years ago, at the same time that they bore witness to a high degree of skill in the art of casting bronze. Amongst the great variety of archaeological finds they stand out in terms of both size and quantity. They were well preserved; some could still be played, and trombonists could demonstrate their excellent technical possibilities as performing instruments. In addition, rock carvings representing the instruments which date from the same period were preserved. Naturally a great deal of attention was devoted to the lurs in monographs as well as in extensive articles, including a work by the Danish music historian Angul Hammerich (1893), which was translated into both French and German (Hammerich 1893). Later Hammerich writes in the publication Dansk Musikhistorie (here freely rendered from the Danish): Like a fanfare, Denmark’s music history starts out with the large and beautiful Danish lurs from the Bronze Age. Indeed, a grand overture. With the lurs we can trace Nordic music history further back than we can in the case of any other current civilised European nation. (Hammerich 1921, 1–2) 180 CAJSA S. LUND THE SOUND OF ARCHAEOLOGY When the present author in the early 1970s—having been active as a musician—began to study prehistoric archaeology at the University of Lund, it soon became apparent that methodological studies of music and other sound activities in prehistoric Scandinavia for the most part seemed to be quite a neglected field on the archaeological map, with the exception of the bronze lurs. My supervisors as well as my fellow students encouraged me in my choice of subject for my undergraduate thesis, on prehistoric musical instruments in the Nordic countries (Lund 1972), albeit after some hesitation. This is due to “the non-archaeological character” of the subject—archaeology works with observable traces of humans, and music can certainly not be dug up physically out of the ground; also, there seemed to be very few finds of musical instruments apart from the lurs. My hypothetical point of departure was that different kinds of musical instruments and other sound tools from Scandinavia’s prehistoric periods lay overlooked and/or misinterpreted in the storehouses of the archaeological museums. The fundamental idea was that these presumed “hidden” material traces of ancient music and sound activities were not primarily musical instruments in our conventional Western sense, but objects used for various sound productions e.g. signalling, hunting calls, and in magical, and cultic contexts. This approach, which was influenced by ethnomusicology, opened up new possibilities of interpretation regarding archaeological find materials in the selection of museum collections that I inventoried. Is the bone tube with bevelled ends (registered as an artefact with unknown function) a shaft, a bead, an amulet, a needle case, an animal call, or something entirely different? At the same time this approach gave rise to an important problem: how can one substantiate, or in any case corroborate, the assumption that a particular archaeological artefact, or a whole group of similar artefacts, with unknown or unclear function, has been utilised for sound production, primarily or secondarily? The thesis was a step toward a more systematic and comprehensive multidisciplinary research in the field of prehistoric music in the Nordic countries, with a focus on southern Scandinavia. Its direction was then, and still is, markedly organological in so far as its orientation is to a large extent concerned with the primary sources of the field, viz. questions dealing with finds of musical instruments and other MUSIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN SCANDINAVIA, 1800–1990 181 sound tools, certain or possible (see Fig. 2). The field was at first given the English name “musical archaeology,” later on “music archaeology” (and in Swedish musikarkeologi), in 1974 by the staff of the Music Museum, Stockholm (Larsson 1974a, 4; Larsson 1974b, 3),1 but then without any cognizance of the fact that the term had been used occasionally a few times already in the nineteenth century, in Sweden for example in 1880 (Södling 1880, 203). On the known history of the term as such, see the Appendix below. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND PRIOR TO THE 1970S Pioneers As previously mentioned, the bronze lurs have held a central position in researchers’ as well as in the general public’s conceptions of prehistoric musical life in the Nordic countries, since the early nineteenth century. For the latter-day role of the bronze lur as a national and political symbol, see Fig. 3. However, sporadic studies of prehistoric sound instruments other than the bronze lurs were also completed early on, e.g. a blowing horn made of an ox horn with bronze additions, found at Barva, Sweden, dated to the early Iron Age (Hildebrand 1881; see Fig. 4), early stringed instruments (Panum 1915, 1928, 1931),2 early bells and cow bells (Lithberg 1914), Norwegian Iron Age iron rattles (rangler; see Petersen 1917), the lyre bridge found at Broa on Gotland, Sweden (Salin 1922), a wooden megaphone found at Kvalsund, Norway, dated to the Iron Age (Shetelig and Johannessen 1929), and the so called “Balkåkra drum,” found at Balkåkra, Sweden, dated to the early Bronze Age (Nerman 1937).
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