From the Puget Sound to Arthur’s Seat: Seattle to Edinburgh

Before coming to Edinburgh, I worked for two years at an animal shelter in my home town, taking care of homeless dogs and cats

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I’ve been both a musician and a history lover since childhood, beginning as a cellist before branching off into pretty much any instrument I could get my hands on. I started composing music as well when I was very young, and got interested in orchestration, which is the role that different instruments play in the orchestra and how to write music for them. Between playing and writing for them, I became a hobby instrument collector, and it was a short jump from learning about instruments in the orchestra to learning about them and their history in general. And while learning archaeology, which is the study of historical material culture, I realised that these same methods and interpretations could be applied to instruments as well.

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My PhD research here in Edinburgh focuses on the history of brass instruments. If you aren’t familiar with them, a brass instrument is a type of musical instrument which – despite its name – isn’t defined as being made of brass, but rather as an instrument which you play by vibrating, or ‘buzzing’, your lips into. These vibrations create a sound which is amplified and shaped by the instrument, and using their lips to control the speed of the vibrations a player can play a whole set of different notes on just a tube. Even if you’re not a musician, some brass instruments you might know of are the trumpet, the trombone, the tuba, and the French horn, which come from classical music but are also used across a wide range of other genres.

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A trombone (left) and trumpet (right) on display in St Cecilia’s hall, Edinburgh

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But the world of brass instruments is quite a bit larger than this, and while these ones are typically made in metal, brass instruments around the world can be made of other materials like wood, shell, and animal horn – hence the name “horn” for the instrument. I’ll be studying brass instruments from across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa from the medieval period to the present day, and namely those instruments we consider to be types of “horns” and “trumpets”, which covers a wide variety of build materials, forms, and technological applications. I envision my project as a physical survey of these instruments across time, making it a form of archaeology, as well as an interpretive survey of how they’re used in different contexts, making it a form of sociological inquiry, and to reflect this I have co-supervision for this project from both of those fields.

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Currently, we know a good deal about brass instrument history in Europe. At least a few large books have been written on the topic, and museums are full of historical European brass instruments, including St Cecilia’s Hall here in Edinburgh where I’m based. In general, we know that these instruments started out in largely functional, non-musical roles, such as signalling in warfare or hunting, announcing royalty, and communing with God in religious ritual. But around the time of the Renaissance, these instruments started getting involved in music-making as well, and to facilitate this, over the next several centuries a wide variety of technologies were experimented with to allow brass instruments to change pitch and thereby to play full melodies.

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A variety of brass isntruments on display in St Cecilia’s hall – centre: a cornett from the 17th century – left top to bottom: an orchestral hand-horn (MIMEd 2888) from c.1780, and an early valved horn (MIMEd 0204) from 1830 – right top to bottom: a sackbut or early trombone (MIMEd 3205) from 1794, a slide trumpet (MIMEd 3288) from 1830, a keyed trumpet (MIMEd 3158) from 1835, and an early form of valve trumpet (MIMEd 3286) from c.1840

By contrast, we don’t know much about brass instrument history in the Middle East and North Africa. The few brass instruments we have documented from this part of the world are generally viewed as being archaic and essentially medieval, and are hugely overshadowed by Western brass instruments which have been used across the region since its colonisation in the 19th century. This is right in line with many of the larger prejudices towards the Middle East and North Africa. But even cutting through the prejudice, it does seem like the instruments which were developed over the centuries in this region are quite different from European instruments. These differences are both technological – the forms and build of the instruments – and social – the functions they serve whether musical or otherwise – and I’m going into this research with that two-pronged approach.

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A variety of brass instruments from across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia – clockwise: illustration from the Maqamat of al-Hariri from the 11th-12th century Abbasid Caliphate displaying a collection of mounted soldiers with two trumpets; illustration from the Aja’ib al-Makhluqat wa Ghara’ib al-Mawjudat from 13th century Iran depicting an archangel playing a trumpet; a photograph from the 1860s from the “Turkestan Album” of Aleksandr Kun showing a man playing a karnay trumpet; an illustration from 1486 of two types of Ottoman trumpet, one straight and one with an ‘S’ curve; photo taken by me of a Jewish shofar (MIMEd 3757) on display in St Cecilia’s Hall. All photos from the public domain

But despite these apparent differences, there are a couple key instances of connection that we know of between the instruments in these regions. It’s recorded that the sound of Muslim trumpets was very striking to Crusaders in the Holy Land, and it’s even been suggested that this caused the Crusaders to bring the instrument back with them and reintroduce it to Europe in the first place. This story would make the differences that we see in the instruments now even more interesting, because it suggests diverging paths from a common origin. The other big connection which bookends this period is the colonisation of the Middle East and North Africa by European empires beginning in the 19th and lasting through to the 20th (and arguably 21st) centuries, during which European brass instruments were widely adopted across the region along with European music in general.

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Illustration from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a 13th century Castillian manuscript of music filled with illustrations of medieval instruments. This illustration shows two trumpet players with instruments which appear similar to those found in contemporary illustrations from the Middle East and North Africa. The Iberian peninsula, nowadays Spain and Portugal, was under Muslim rule for many centuries and became an important centre of intellectual and cultural exchange. Photo from the public domain

A carved ivory “oliphant” horn (BM 1923,1205.3) on display in the British Museum, so named as it was carved from an elephant’s tusk, dating from the 10th-11th century in Italy, another point of contact between Europe and North Africa

These examples of people exchanging instruments between these areas show why this broad geographic span of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa is good to study together. We’ve typically thought of Europe on the one hand and the Middle East and North Africa on the other as being fundamentally separate and opposed regions. This goes back to the old distinctions of “Orient” and “Occident”. But in fact this whole region, centred on the Mediterranean but extending much further beyond as well, has actually historically been a very interconnected world with lots of different people moving around lots of different societies. Looking at this whole area together then not only allows me to study that common origin and comparative change which we see in the instrument history, but also helps overcome some of the prejudices and divides which loom large in the wake of significant conflicts between the “Islamic World” and “the West” in the present day. And because brass instruments in particular have that long history of association with war, politics and religion, they resonate rather powerfully with these conflicts, and their history spanning this area may actually add something to how we think about those conflicts as well.

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Map showing the rough area of study in my project, centred on the Mediterranean but spanning most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, including much of Iran

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So if the brass instruments found in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa do share a common technological origin in an interconnected social world, then why do we see so much difference between them in musical function and in material form? This is my research question, and to answer it I’ll start by filling in the gaps in our knowledge of Middle Eastern and North African brass instruments, since we’ve essentially got a thousand years of not really knowing what they were like and what was happening with them. At the same time I plan to compile and re-analyse the history we have for European brass instruments as well, so that I can describe more concretely the differences in change over time between these groups. The next step would be trying to explain the causes of these differences, specifically with reference to the place of these instruments within their wider societies.

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To tackle this “techno-social” approach, I’ll be documenting the various material and technological “attributes”, or traits, of a wide variety of instruments across the study area. This is a qualitative method which assesses simply whether an attribute is present or absent from a specific instrument. But there will also be a small amount of measurement and calculation of certain features, though even this is done with the goal of identifying groupings which can be made into attributes as well. With all these attributes documented and associated with a particular instrument’s date and place of manufacture, they can then be put into a timeline and drawn on a map. That helps visualise each attribute’s distribution, and puts them into historical and geographic context. The attributes can also be used to compare degrees of similarity between instruments, and trace connections based on that similarity. This whole approach again shows that two-pronged way of looking at it, combining the material history of the instruments with the interpretation of their social context.

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Left: two examples from the attribute data collection tables showing attributes ticked or unticked for each instrument, the two tables shown here being slide and architectural attributes; right: a graph showing the quantitative measures for how conical the tube of the instrument is against how flared its bell is. This graph of the first 13 instruments shows a cluster forming in the upper left, indicating instruments with fairly cylindrical tubes (tubes which stay close to the same diameter throughout) but with fairly substantial flares in their bells, but also one instrument with a very cylindrical tube (a tube which increases diameter throughout) yet with almost no flare in its bell (the tube just ends like a cone, rather than flaring out like a modern trumpet). As these groupings form, they could be assigned as an attribute to each instrument as well.

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After data collection comes interpretation, which in this case is essentially finding human and social insight in the material data. One way to do this is to look at material attributes as suggesting the function or role that the instrument was intended to fill, since it is those attributes which give the instrument certain qualities or abilities. You can also look at this the other way, that in the process of manufacturing these instruments people “embed” the musical or more broadly social goals and values that they’re trying to attain into the instrument, since the attributes of the instrument are designed for it to meet certain standards and expectations.

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Musical instruments are essentially tools, and are built to carry out a certain task, meaning that whatever that task is must be related to the attributes of the instrument. That task may be musical, meaning that the instrument will be designed with making a certain kind of music in mind. But the task might be something else, like, in the case of trumpets, communicating signals across an army or symbolising the authority of a king, in which case it will be built with attributes aimed at accomplishing those things. This digs into some key sociological theories about the relationship between people and material things, and I find that mixing those theories with archaeological analysis is a really powerful way to understand historical societies using material culture.

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Instruments as tools: the left instrument here is a military bugle (MIMEd 0903) from 1914. It’s military function is known not just from its history, but also its design: it is small, compact, and equipped with rings to attach a strap to, indicating its portability. It has no pitch changing devices or even a tuning slide, suggesting it was not required to play “in tune” in a musical sense or play melodies outside the natural harmonic series. It’s also been adorned at some point with a tassle which fits into a uniform. By contrast, the right instrument (MIMEd 2321) from 1885 is very much a music-making instrument of the Western tradition, which is built into its form. It is equipped with three valves which allow it to play fully chromatically within the Western 12-tone scale. Additionally, it is equipped with multiple ways to change the pitch of the overall instrument, including a fourth rotary valve and a crook (small section of additional pipe) to place after the mouthpiece. These suggest it was intended to play a wide variety of classical repertoire which was written for trumpets at a variety of different pitches

So these are the essential ideas sitting behind my project. For now, things are still getting started, and for the most part it starts with lots of reading. The literature review has quite a few topics to cover, including sociological theories of materiality and technology, evolutionary archaeology, music sociology/archaeology, organology and brass instrument history, and even the general history of the Mediterranean and relations between Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. There’s also going to be a lot of tracking down any information that might be out there on the few named Middle Eastern and North African brass instruments we do know of,  and I’d also like to dip into the historical treatises on music and any other primary documents which talk about instruments. I’m currently working out a list of museums across Europe and the Middle East and North Africa to get in touch with in search of instruments to study, and in the meantime I’ve started working with the instruments at St Cecilia’s. Once I get more data I can start trying out some of these theories and models and seeing how they fit.

Me holding a slide trumpet (3288) from 1830, currently on display in St Cecilia’s hall

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If you’ve made it this far, thank you! Really, it means a lot for me to share what I’m passionate about with others. If anything I wrote about here brings up any thoughts, ideas, questions, or suggestions, please feel free to share! I’d love to know more about what people are interested in hearing about from this topic.

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And finally, stay tuned! Over the next few months and years, I’ll share the progress of this journey, the hurdles I’ll inevitably have to navigate, and the discoveries I make along the way. I’d love to have you along for it.

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Thanks for reading,

Peter

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