Stef Conner and Andy Lowings have brought Babylonian music back to the modern world.
Conner's new album, The Flood,' is a culmination of the Gold Lyre of Ur project's diligent work to recreate one of the earliest known musical instruments with her own work in the field of linguistic composition. The charitable organization, the Gold Lyre of Ur, was formed in 2003 after the museum of Baghdad was vandalized. The group worked to recreate an authentic, playable version of a 4,500-year-old lyre. Here is a video of Bill Taylor and Barnaby Brown of the Gold Lyre of Ur group actually performing on a recreated lyre and pipes.
So how do you figure out what music from four-thousand years ago sounds like? Music from the Mesopotamian region was not notated as we see music today, but rather, it was first written as text only with a few examples of music notation written in cuneiform. It is this correlation between words and music that has fascinated Conner in her studies and her own compositions. For example: If you merely think of the words, "Take me out to the ball-field." What comes to mind? A tune? A whole song? That is precisely what it means to derive music solely from written words and their individual syllables, and that is a basic example of how syllables in text can lead to a musical connotation without any music on a page. So, while the Gold Lyre of Ur project coordinators worked on recreating the ancient instrument, Conner deciphered how the Babylonian language sounded when spoken and made careful inductions about how that could translate to music. She also looked at key features such as rhythms and melodic patterns in music from the Mesopotamian region today to survey what might have come from ages passed. You can hear all of that on her album coming out in January 2015. Check out her page HERE for more detail.