| Abstrakt: |
Various ancient authors have listed and partially described marginal instruments, made of oats, wheat, barley, hemlock, dried reed, horn, bone, terracotta, and also turned wood. They were all made and played by shepherds, children, hunters, snake charmers and low-ranking professional musicians. They were used for onomatopoeic play, to play dance music, to accompany improvised poetry or as hunting calls. These same instruments, still mentioned in organological studies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are still in use in the musical traditions of many places. What they have in common is that they tell, in one way or another, of rudimentary-looking things, of the relationship with nature and, above all, of a primitive stage of human existence. The shepherds, who frequent wild nature and dress in goatskins, are primitives. Children are also primitive, as they experience the primordial state of human existence. Primitives are the hunters, who partly identify with their prey and imitate their calls. Primi tives are the snake charmers, whose names and practices contain echoes of magical practices that appeared wild and remote even in the ancient world. Primitives are the itinerant players of dance music, who charge to accompany rituals or dances. Again, instru ments whose cavities are made from clay, animal bones, the na turally hollow stem of grasses or arundo donax are primitive. And finally, symbol of primordial purity is the wax, a natural product of the industriousness of bees, with which the reeds are assembled, and with which the reeds and fingering holes are tuned. The words that I examine in this article—and the images and objects that correspond to them, as far as it is possible to trace a relationship between forms and names—are tityrinoi, calamauloi, kerauloi. In modern language, certain aerophone names corre spond to those terms. Here, I make an attempt to identify and unravel the relationship between ancient and modern names and objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
