Five volumes of scores with diagrams and commentaries prepared for EMAP by Barnaby Brown:
The EMAP Resources for Euterpe are for aulos learners and for the singers, composers and scholars with whom they collaborate. The number of people who possess the instruments, reeds and embouchure skills necessary to play all the aulos parts can currently be counted on one hand, but that is set to change. The 1st Euterpe Doublepipe School, held in Tarquinia in May 2018, had twenty participants from Argentina, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA. Conditions are favourable for the ranks of competent players to grow thanks to the remarkable progress made over the last two decades by a few pioneers. The support of EMAP during the last five years has made a significant impact, bringing isolated specialists together in collaborative exchange to develop reproductions of archaeological finds and performances that interpret ancient evidence in innovative ways.
Now that we have instruments that work well and some preliminary ideas on how to play them, the time is ripe for the publication of attractive performing materials. This need was recognized by EMAP, which organized the 1st Euterpe Doublepipe School and commissioned these volumes. They contain the first scores for aulos in modern times – at least, the first to capture in detailed notation music that is consistent with the superstar status of the aulos in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Each volume is available as a single PDF; additionally, the elements within them are available in open file formats, so that users may revise them in any way they wish.
These volumes are not fixed. They are fluid ‘Very Early music’ experiments, flavoured with personal biases and cultural conditioning that have nothing to do with the ancient world. Their aim is to enrich cultural life in the present at the same time as pushing the boundaries of scholarly knowledge through interdisciplinary work.
Each volume captures an on-going conversation between makers, players, composers, archaeologists, philologists and musicologists. Other ways of interpreting the same ancient evidence should be explored because the degree of conjecture is inevitably substantial. By sharing editable file formats, making adaptation of the EMAP Resources for Euterpe easy, we trust these volumes will evolve and diversify over time. As is true of any musical tradition, the health and vigour of the doublepipe revival depends on innovation and experimentation.
Barnaby Brown, November 2018
