Ancient Music: The Sumerians (part 3)
The development of city-states produced a vibrant atmosphere for sound. The human experience, once past the city walls, entered a world that was surrounded noise. The persistent activities important to daily life included immense music. The streets, dwellings, and businesses of Sumerian civilizations were filled with songs. Lorenzo Verderame documents in his 2020 article about Sumerian soundscapes, “Work songs reckon the rhythm of artisans’ workshops and field’s tasks. Shepherds and herders cross the streets leading their flocks and herds at the cry ellu mallu. Musical instruments accompany the constant prayers and the divine processions as well as the performance of street musicians, and they all mix with the noise of the market.” (from the curse of the Agade). The specific compositions of this musical lexicon still elude us, either through their lack of inclusion in the written record, or through their destruction over time. We do have some fascinating insights into their basic properties, including instrumentation, tonality, and subject, and they provide rough approximations of what it may have sounded like, though we have no way of knowing for sure.
Sumerian instrumentation is documented in many of the song constructions of their ancient texts. The titles include the instrument accompaniment. This designation indicates the number of strings or pitches, and also gives us some clues as to its tonal references. Professor Langdon, the Babylonian and Hebrew Musical Terms Author made some of these discoveries as early as 1921, stating “In the introduction to my Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms was derived, from early rubrics attached to Sumerian songs, the principle that the Sumerians classified their psalms and liturgical services chiefly by the names of the instruments employed in accompaniments.” (Langdon p169). The wind instruments found in Sumerian culture give us evidence of their tonal song construction. Langdon writes, “The wind instruments allow us to decipher note structures by the pitches they reproduce. When blown open the pipe sounds the note G, when one of the upper holes is stopped the note E is produced, and when both upper holes is closed the note C is obtained. The instrument carries the three notes C, E, G or the majors of the octave C, and hence could be designated as the instrument of third” (Langdon p181). While this doesn’t allow us knowledge of note order, rhythm, or duration, our understanding of human sensitivities to harmonic resonance allows us some presumptions of what they might have performed. This, along with the cadence and meter of the written text that these instruments accompanies have lent to musicians creating modern approximations of these early soundscapes.
Another researcher, Jerrold S. Cooper, has made progress in understanding how genre plays an important role in how musical expression presented itself in the Sumerian streets. The lamentations, historical stories, and legends that the Sumerians, Akkadians, and even the Gutians that would topple the great cities during a period of extreme drought and famine of the 2nd millennia B.C. have distinct categories that we can suppose based on their content, accompaniment, and lyrical style. This research is significant in connecting historical record with musical practices that pre-date the written word. Specifically, this becomes relevant when exploring the substance of one of the earliest laments that we have access to, The Curse of Agade. This tale holds some keys to how genre and its properties in music denotes the evolution from something before. The Curse of Agade lament suggests subversion to something prior, and as Cooper writes, “… this subversion of genre is only possible if there is already a genre to subvert!” (Cooper, p40). These indications of performative properties may not give us concrete knowledge of what music sounded like to the Sumerian people, but these clues to genre, instrumentation, tonality, and subject are a rich pattern of knowledge allowing us to approximate.
Cooper goes on to suggest that gender and genre also play a role in our ability to categorize Sumerian composition. The ceremony associated with music included weddings and funerals, as he notes “… weddings and funerals are the only two transformative life-cycle rituals in ancient Mesopotamia of which we are aware.” (Cooper, p44) Both the love songs and funeral lamentations share the Emesal dialect but could not be further apart in style and content. However, the use of this dialect “… in Sumerian is for the speech of women and goddesses in many literary texts, and for ritual laments. If lamentation's origins are in women's funeral songs, it explains why the dialect of lamentation is a dialect otherwise associated only with women.” This connection to gender gives us even more inferences to the tonal quality of some Sumerian music. The scope of information that we have without a note of written manuscript begs the question of what modern music would sound like if this had been the method of the transmission for compositions throughout human history.
What would European music sound like if we only knew these circumstantial pieces of the story, instead of the notation that we now benefit from?
While you sit and postulate these questions, enjoy today’s listening example. It shows how people are still intrigued by these tales and attempting their own interpretations of what these stories mean to them. Here is a group called Sargon Unplugged, playing their version of The Curse of Agade. Thanks for reading!