The Carnyx, Bronze Age Sound
Ancient Music Band 'La Banda Europa' Features Dark Age Battle Horn
© Ja Woolf
The ancient musical instrument, the carnyx, has been reconstructed and now plays with La Banda Europa. The instrument may also be a totem with religious significance.
It's not a sculpture, it makes a lot of noise, and yes, it has a mane and ears. Meet the carnyx, a battle horn dating from the European Bronze Age.
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John Kenny, musician and ethnomusicologist, is passionate about it. He's helped the National Museum of Scotland to reconstruct this primordial brass instrument (known as the Deskford carnyx) from remains dug from remote Scottish moorland.
As the world's only professional carnyx player, Kenny's recitals are popular, even though the carnyx sounds like a mix of a didgeridoo, a wailing ghost and a wild animal. "It's modeled on a wild boar, so I let the sound grunt and cry in a wild-boar like way" he explains.
He plays with a totally unique group, La Banda Europa, which uses strange instruments like the following:
- hurdy-gurdies - hand-cranked semi-automatic instruments of great antiquity,
- bugles from Spain,
- nyckelharpas - a stringed instrument from Sweden, and
- Armenian duduks - a cylindrical wooden instrument a little bit like a flute,
- together with various types of bagpipes, strings and percussion from all over the world. (La Banda Europa is available on YouTube.)
Creating Sounds
Many people would probably agree that the carnyx is the most dramatic of all the instruments in the group. All the music which it plays, is of course, modern. There’s no carnyx repertoire in existence, for the simple reason that no authentic Bronze Age music survives. La Banda Europa is lucky in its composer, Jim Sutherland. Jim, holder of the Creative Scotland prize, is an intensely creative musician who is no stranger to unusual musical combinations. Winning the Creative Scotland prize gave Jim time to develop his plans to help create a band which offered a unique 'sound of Europe”.
If assembling a repertoire for the carnyx is hard, physically playing the instrument is harder still, for keeping that great boar's-head aloft takes stamina and balance. "I did weight training and consulted an acrobatic choreographer" explains Kenny.
He's also involved in the restoration of even more ancient wind instruments, including one nearly a thousand years older than the carnyx. "It's made of beaten bronze and held together with 360 golden rivets" he says. "It's so heavy that you play it while it's resting on the floor. It was dug from a bog in Ireland"
Mystery
Such ancient instruments have a mysterious side, he adds. Although the carnyx was used mainly as a battle horn, some archaeologists suspect that it could also be a kind of totem. "There's an idea that the original of this one met its end as a ritual sacrifice." he admits - which makes the creature's other-worldly voice seem even more eerie.
