Flute of Forgotten Dreams

I just adore everything related to the Stone Age, so Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary about cave paintings immediately caught my attention, like a mint cat.


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Here is the movie trailer:



A little more video about the movie can be found on the IMDB page . Herzog was inspired by the article by Judith Thurman in the New Yorker.

Most of the film is about the visual art of the Stone Age, but it also deviates towards the Stone Age music. In another cave, not shown in the film, they found several flutes made from mammoth tusks and one carved from the radius of a vulture .



These flutes are about 35 or 40 thousand years old, which makes them the oldest known musical instruments (with the exception of the human body ).



In the film, paleontologist Wolf Hein (Wulf Hein) changed from head to toe in reindeer hides and plays a copy of a vulture's flute.



This ancient instrument, without doubt, is tuned to the major pentatonic scale . Such a technique as overblow allows you to get the missing major notes of the scale, so Hein managed to play the anthem of the United States. Amazing. Listen to the story he told about it on NPR radio.

I knew that every musical culture in the world uses a pentatonic scale, but I did not imagine that it was so ancient. The fact that it is a very ancient gamma, and is almost ubiquitous, suggests that there is more to it than just cultural preferences. The pentatonic scale is very rich and symmetrical. The basic tones can be arranged in such a way that they will all be repeated through the fifth. Two tones, spaced apart from each other by a fifth, have a 3/2 ratio between their frequencies, which makes it the simplest musical ratio after the octave. Also, quint can be obtained from the simplest number of overtones .

I strongly doubt that our ancient ancestors thoroughly knew the numerical relationship between tone and their music. But it was not by chance that they stopped at the pentatonic scale. Flutes are extremely difficult to do, and they are proof of very hard work. People struggling for survival do not do such hard work for no reason. As is the case with the drawings, we can only guess what this music meant for the people of the Ice Age, but it was probably something significant. I adhere to the theory that music had a major impact on survival, and flutes from the Ice Age are important evidence of this.

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