Rafael Perez Arroyo - Music From Ancient Egypt [MP3 192][TNTVILLAGE]

[SIZE=12]Music From Ancient Egypt - Rafael Pérez Arroyo





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Titolo: Music From Ancient egypt

Anno: 20 May 2002

Genere: New Age/Antica

Etichetta: Centro de Estudios Egipcios



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First Prize 2002, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport to the Best Scientific Book. Available in both English and Spanish editions. Hardcover clothbound, 495 pages on couché matte paper, 24 x 30 cm, with 108 photographs and 104 illustrations.

After ten years of research carried out by the Spanish musicologist Rafael Pérez Arroyo, with the collaboration of Syra Bonet, the Centro de Estudios Egipcios has now published the first in a series of scientific works on the music, musicians, iconography, dance and musical instruments of Ancient Egypt. This first volume deals with the Predynastic period and the Old Kingdom. It discovers for us the importance of music in Ancient Egypt and its interrelationship with the sciences, the thinking and the cosmology. It also reveals the possible influence of the music of the Pharaonic temples on the Greek theorists, on Western and Middle Eastern liturgical chant and identifies certain elements in common with the cultures of the Far East.

Many of the photographs are of previously unpublished objects, instruments and music reliefs. The 104 high-quality drawings give millimetric plans of the Pharaonic musical instruments used 5000 years ago and also reproduce virtually all the music scenes found in the necropolises of Giza, Sakkara and in the provinces.

Included for the first time ever are a glossary of Old Kingdom music terms and a selection of 30 hymns from the Pyramid Texts, reflecting their different musical forms: recitational, antiphonal, responsorial and alleluia. They are presented in hieroglyphic script, together with a transliteration and translation made by José María de Diego Muñiz.



Drawing on his speciality, the musicology of antiquity, and after finishing various studies and publications on Spanish Renaissance music and instruments, which he began in 1979, the author decided to undertake a project to reconstruct the music of Ancient Egypt as the subject of his doctoral thesis.

Very far from this initial project, however, the first book, Music in the Age of the Pyramids, is the result of a long process and the sum of various activities. One of these, begun in 1991, was the recompilation of the relevant studies and technical articles published in the field of Egyptology. The majority of these were widely dispersed and offered an incomplete treatment of the subject with now outdated information. Another was the research carried out between 1997 and 1999 in Egypt. This included the study of instruments conserved in different museums, especially the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and in European collections, the analysis of Egyptian sources, the folklore of the Nile Valley, Coptic liturgical music and the Greek writers. It culminated in the examination in situ of the iconography in Egypt.

The synthesis of all these activities makes it possible to present, for the very first time, a complete picture of the music of Ancient Egypt and also to offer new hypotheses and discoveries. This project, therefore, contributes to widening the interests of both Egyptologists and the general public.

During the research more than 4000 photographs of instruments and reliefs were taken, hundreds of millimetric plans and drawings made, and information collected through digital recordings of the folklore and popular instruments of the Nile Valley, particularly in the Western Oases and in Nubia.



• Replicas were also made of some of the instruments conserved in museums in order to observe their performance characteristics and sound qualities. The most important of these were the reconstructions, based on fragments conserved in museums and on the detailed iconography, of two Old Kingdom curved harps. (Thanks to sponsorship from Sony España, S.A.).



In carrying out this work great help was provided by new computer-assisted design and hieroglyphics programmes, digital measuring tools, magnetic thickness measuring equipment, digital sound recorders, DV digital videos, and daylight illumination and microphotography equipment.