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9,000 Year Old Chinese Flutes Newspaper Articles |
AFTER 9,000 YEARS, OLDEST PLAYABEL FLUTE IS HEAD AGAIN
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9,000 Year Old Chinese Flutes Newspaper Articles |
September 28, 1999
By Henry Fountain
Chinese archeologists have unearthed what is believed to be the
oldest known playable musical instrument, a seven-holed flute
fashioned 9,000 years ago from the hollow wing bone of a large
bird.
The instrument, about nine inches long, is the best preserved
of six intact flutes found with fragments of about 30 others at
Jiahu, a remarkably rich but little-known archeological site in
the Yellow River valley in Henan Province in central China. Radiocarbon
dating shows the site was occupied for 1,300 years beginning around
7000 B.C., during the early Neolithic period in China.
Nine millennia after lips last touched it, the flute was played
again and its tones analyzed. The seven holes produced a rough
scale covering a modern octave, beginning close to the second
A above middle C. There is evidence that the flute was tuned:
a small hole drilled next to the seventh hole had the effect of
raising that hole's tone from roughly G-sharp to A, completing
the octave.
It is impossible to know what relationship, if any, the tones
have to six- or seven-tone Chinese scales first documented 6,000
years later (the other intact flutes have five to eight holes,
but are not playable because of their condition). But the fact
that the playable flute had a carefully selected tone scale indicates
that the Neolithic musicians may have been able to play more than
single notes, but actual music.
While fragments of what appear to be flutes made from animal bones
have been found at much older Neanderthal sites, the Chinese instruments
are the oldest ones that have remained intact. They were discovered
more than a decade ago, but are only now being described in the
West in a paper in the journal Nature, the result of an unusual
collaboration between the Chinese researchers and a scientist
at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
The Chinese scientists had published their work in journals only
in their own country, which in terms of making it known worldwide
"is as effective as entombing it in the Great Pyramids,"
said the Brookhaven scientist, Garman Harbottle, an expert in
using nuclear science in archeological and fine arts applications.
Through contacts in China, Dr. Harbottle was invited to visit
with Chinese archeologists and specialists in radiocarbon dating.
On a side trip, he was taken to Henan Province and shown items
from the Jiahu dig.
"They showed me shelves and shelves of artifacts that they
had taken out of this site over about six years," Dr. Harbottle
said. The artifacts included pottery and ceramics and items made
from stone and bone. Their number and variety were astounding,
Dr. Harbottle said.
Toward the end of the visit, the Chinese scientists opened a safe
and took out the flutes. "I was absolutely astounded,"
said Dr. Harbottle, who persuaded his Chinese colleagues that
the discovery should be published in the West. He helped analyze
the radiocarbon data and wrote the Nature paper.
The flutes are made from the bones of the red-crowned crane, a
fact that could have significance in Chinese culture, said James
C. Y. Watt, Brooke Russell Astor curator of Asian art at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. He said there was a Chinese legend,
first documented about 2,000 years ago, of people who could summon
cranes by playing on the flute.
Although there is no way of knowing the origin of the legend,
Mr. Watt said he was fascinated by "this very distant connection
between the flute and the crane."
The flutes, found in some of the more than 300 graves uncovered
at the site, almost certainly were used in rituals, said Frederick
Lau, an ethnomusicologist and associate professor at California
Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. They may have
been used as bronze bells dating back 2,000 years were used, at
temple fairs, burials and other ritualistic events.
"But I wouldn't exclude the fact that flutes could have been
used for personal entertainment," Dr. Lau said. More modern
bamboo flutes were used in official rites, particularly in the
military, going back many hundreds of years, but they were also
widely used in the popular music of regional cultures and played
an important role in Chinese opera.
The flutes are only the most remarkable artifacts from Jiahu,
less than 5 percent of which has been excavated. More than 40
house foundations have been uncovered, as have 370 cellars and
9 pottery kilns.
There are signs at the site of rice cultivation, Mr. Watt said,
adding to speculation about which Asian culture first domesticated
rice. And the middens, the site's refuse pits, contain remains
of many animal species, Dr. Harbottle said, indicating that the
Jiahu people had a rich diet.
Also uncovered at Jiahu, Mr. Watt said, were pictograms, signs
carved on tortoise shells. Similar artifacts have been found among
the remains of a culture that flourished in the second millennium
B.C., he said. In that culture, the shells were used as a form
of divination. They were touched by a piece of hot metal, and
resulting cracks were interpreted as good or bad omens, with the
results carved permanently on the shell. The discovery of shell
pictograms at Jiahu, Mr. Watt said, "means that this form
of divination may have gone back thousands of years."
Jiahu may turn out to be one of the most important sites for understanding
the early underpinnings of Chinese society, when humans left the
caves of the Stone Age and began practicing agriculture and establishing
permanent settlements.
"The site would be a very exciting and important one,"
Dr. Harbottle said, given all the other artifacts discovered there.
"The flutes were just icing on the cake."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
Distant Melodies -- Recently Uncovered Ancient Flute Sings a Prehistoric History
By Amanda Onion
NEW YORK -- Long ago in China, someone picked up the hollow wing
bone of a crane, smoothed the edges and bored seven holes along
one side. Then, perhaps to correct for an off-key note, they drilled
an even smaller hole beside the last. Last month and 9,000 years
later, a musician picked up the same ancient instrument and played
a Chinese folk song using that extra, pitch-correcting hole. It
played perfectly.
"The guy [not a woman?--BF] had obviously spent a lot of
time on it," said Garman Harbottle, a chemist at the Brookhaven
National Laboratory in Long Island who wrote about the ancient
flute in this week's journal, Nature. "He didn't want to
throw it away, so he found a way to correct it."
A New Art Form
Archeological evidence has shown that people have created musical
instruments since the ancestors of modern man first appeared.
The earliest instruments -- such as whistles and drums -- were
most likely crafted with a purpose in mind. Drums provided a form
of communication over long distances and whistles could lure a
bird or other creature to their human predator.
Later, people discovered scales -- a graduated series of notes
that make ear-pleasing melodies when played in certain sequences.
Now, for the first time, scientists have a sense of just what
kind of sound ancient musicians may have produced during the Neolithic
period of human history.
The 9,000-year-old flute that weathered the centuries to remain
in unusually fine condition was found at the village of Jiahu,
located by the central Yellow River valley in China. The site
is particularly rich with artifacts including turquoise carvings,
elaborate pottery and a carved tortoise shell with engraved characters
that some believe could be the ancestor of later Chinese writing.
"This was a flourishing, rich culture," said David Keightley,
a historian of Ancient China at the University of California at
Berkeley. "Because they were able to feed themselves well,
they had high cultural development."
Harbottle suspects the Neolithic people lived in a structured
society where individuals may have carried out roles in the community.
Music may have been one of those roles. Archaeologists found evidence
of more than 30 flutes at the site, all made from the wing bone
of the red-crowned crane and carved with five to seven holes.
The instruments were delicate, measuring about 20 centimeters
in length and one and a half centimeters in width. And all were
found inside graves among the 400 human burials excavated at the
site.
Thousands of years later, only one of these flutes could produce
music without signs of strain. The 22-centimeter flute created
very thin, high-pitched notes that resemble the sound of a person
whistling.
Intuitive Design
Most significantly, Harbottle says the seven notes on the instrument
comprise a nearly accurate octave.
Robert Fink, a musicologist in Saskatchewan, Canada, points out
that in nearly every other matter -- money, distance and time
-- humans divide things into units of ten. It's only in music
that cultures have settled on octaves -- a range of seven notes
with the first note repeated at the end -- to arrange their music.
"The nature of sound, itself, is what ends up cutting the
steps out of the continuum of sound for us," Fink said. "It
overrides the usual desire to make things equal."
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence that music is intuitive
lies in the design of what is thought to be the oldest instrument
ever recovered. In July, 1995, a Slovenian archaeologist found
a 43,000-year-old fragment of a bear femur bone in a cave in northern
former Yugoslavia. Carved into the bone were two complete holes
in the middle and two partial holes carved at each of its broken
ends. The distance between the holes indicated that Neanderthals
once played [notes in] the same musical scale -- known as the
diatonic or do re me scale -- that is used today.
The evenly distributed holes in the Chinese flute suggest it did
not play the whole and half-note sequences of the diatonic scale.
Instead, Harbottle and colleagues suspect it may be part of one
of two ancient Chinese scales that were documented six millennia
later.
The Jiahu settlement that spanned 1,300 years was not advanced
enough to leave behind any written records of its own. But documents
from much later cultures in China appear to allude to the settlement's
ancient flutists.
Upon learning about the bird-bone flutes, James Watt, the curator
of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reconsidered
a Chinese legend that was recorded about 7,000 years after the
end of the Jiahu settlement. In the legend, the flutist's music
is so mesmerizing that large cranes flock from the sky and gather
around the musician. Watt asked, why cranes? "The flutes
from that period were made of bamboo, not bone," he said.
"The connection between the crane and the flute likely came
from how the instruments were made thousands of years earlier."
In order to better analyze the music of these bone flutes, Chinese
scientists plan to create replicas of the instruments. And if
they make a mistake, their ancient ancestors have already demonstrated
how to correct a note.
9,ooo YEAR-OLD CHINESE FLUTES FOUND -- ONE FULLY PLAYABLE W/ DO-RE-MI-LIKE SCALE
By Jospeh B. Verrengia
AP [EXCERPTS] 9/23/99 -- Archaeologists in China have found what
is believed to be the oldest still-playable musical instrument:
a 9,000-year-old flute carved from the wing bone of a crane. When
scientists from the United States and China blew gently through
the mottled brown instrument's mouthpiece and fingered its holes,
they produced tones unheard for millennia, yet familiar to the
modern ear.
"It's a reedy, pleasant sound, a little thin, like a recorder,"
said Garman Harbottle, a nuclear scientist who specializes in
radiocarbon dating at Brookhaven National Laboratory.... The flute
was one of several instruments to be uncovered in Jiahu, a excavation
site of Stone Age artifacts in China's Yellow River Valley....
The flutes have as many as eight neatly hollowed tone holes and
were held vertically to play. The Jiahu flute is considerably
more recent than a flutelike bone discovered in 1995 in an excavation
of Neanderthal tools in a cave in Slovenia....
"You would never have one of these flutes in a symphony.
But clearly, these people knew what an octave sounded like,"
Harbottle said. He said the flute can make what sounds like a
do-re-mi' scale. It even has a tiny hole drilled near hole No.
7, apparently to correct an off-pitch tone.
That the flutes were made of durable bone rather than bamboo,
as later flutes were, also suggests they were culturally important,
and not mere amusements. In fact, some scholars believe the Chinese
written character for "sound" is a stylized representation
of a vertical flute held in the mouth.....
The flutes were uncovered at Jiahu in the 1980s. Their tonal qualities
initially were tested in 1987. The intact Jiahu flute remains
locked in a laboratory in China, but replicas may be constructed
for more tonal tests.
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