Sound Tracks: Uncovering Our Musical Past

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Here is the history of our relationship with music in sixty detective stories.

Sound Tracks is a transporting and extraordinary voyage of discovery, each chapter a time-machine focusing on the discovery of a musical instrument or its fragments in archaeological digs around the world. From the present day all the way back to the dawn of time; from dark caves, watery bogs and fields to rivers, oceans and the depths of the earth, we can now hear the past release its music secrets.

As we enter the worlds of those who created it, long-lost music is itself reconstructed. We feel the delight of a child in Peru in 700 AD, playing with a water-filled pot designed to chirp like a bird; we shiver with a lonely soldier sending signals by trumpet to the next watchtower on Hadrian's Wall; we can almost hear the doleful sounds of the sixty-four bells buried in a tomb in China in the 5th century BC.

On this grand tour of the world's greatest musical discoveries, we discover that music is part of what makes us human - not just as a pastime or religious expression but also as a way we commemorate our pasts, communicate with each other, and shape our lives.

Brimming with astonishing insights, Sound Tracks is an enthralling alternative history of humanity in which the silences of the past are filled with a treasure hoard of vanished sounds and voices. Miraculously, it lets us hear lost music across the centuries..

Author Bio

Graeme Lawson is an extraordinary polymath: an archaeologist, musicologist, scientist, instrument-maker and performer who has been at the forefront of music archaeology for his entire career. He earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was elected Fellow of his college at just twenty-five. Sound Tracks is his first trade book.