In case there haven't been enough clues, yes I travelled last week.
Budget airline, as much as possible a budget, no-frills trip. On the other hand, high-tourist areas have their own particular ways; between lousy public transit options (means a lot of taxi rides) and hotel regulations that don't permit as much as a hot plate (means you eat out a lot) it did in the end cost more than I had hoped.
The archaeology and history and natural history was extremely informative. And it was a fun trip too. Which is good, because there's this dirty little secret about research; you don't tend to generate answers, so much as you generate new questions.
Two days in Athens, most of a week in Crete, centered on Heraklion with short side trips until a final day in Chania in the West. Some of the usual suspects, but no art museums, and few monuments that weren't Ancient (did stop by a few Venetian and Ottoman bits, for instance.)
In short, visited the Palace of Knossos, the Acropolis, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens with an incredible pottery and sculpture collection and probably the best collection in the world from Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae, the spanking new Acropolis Museum, and Tylissos, a fairly recent excavation of ruins dating back to the Minoans.
And I met some Kri Kri, in a rather dismal enclosure at an under-attended public garden.
I didn't have time to get to Mycenae myself, or hike the gorge or visit the high-altitude sites where there had once been Peak Sanctuaries. But I did get the chance to see walls and rooms and daily household ware close up, enough to get a real sense of weight and size and fragility and color. And stroll a bit around the hills getting some sense for the weather and moods and the modern ecosystem (how much are later species, invasive or otherwise, I do not currently know).
And I've been re-thinking a lot. About continuity of Cretan culture, the real meaning of the Minoan culture, the Mycenaean take-over, the Bronze Age Collapse, the so-called Greek Dark Ages and the so-called Greek Miracle. A lot about not just what we know, but how it works emotionally and nationalistically and what the good options are for a writer.
And, yeah, I almost bought a Cretan Lyre. (It ain't a harp -- it's a stick fiddle).
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Provenance, Provenience, Parthenon
Here’s the first image: troups of well-dressed Europeans climbing the maze of stairs, teetering on the artistically fragmented walls, admiring the Victorian brown collonades and the fashion-magazine stylish repainted frescoes.
Here’s the second image. A Turkish powder magazine explodes, delivering the final indignity to the creaking, discolored ruins of Athen’s heart.
Two different cities, two different monuments, two different sets of problems in archaeological restoration and the often complex relationship between a modern nation and their cultural heritage.
Knossos is terribly underfunded. It seems strange at first glance. Athens is scarred by their economic woes; abandoned buildings with gaping windows like rotting teeth in faces covered with graffiti, pavements scored with broken walks and open drains and drifts of garbage. By contrast Heraklion, (from the harbor at least), is clean and modern and wears proudly the remodeling for the 2004 Summer Olympics. Even the tourists look wealthier.
(The contrast is even stronger at Chania. This is basically a sea-side resort town. The history underfoot is barely remarked upon; in a long dockside strip of eateries and bars and trinket shops no signage showed and only a handful of people seemed to know there was a full replica Minoan sailing vessel on display nearby -- among the other archaeological and historical treasures.)
Work has all but stopped at the site of the Palace of Knossos. Down at the Heraklion Museum they speak proudly of the restoration efforts on their collection (which as with so many begins with removing the efforts of the previous generation). But at Knossos itself, the best description of the present efforts is stabilization. Keeping it from disintegrating further before the money for actual work flows in again.
The site is under-documented by the standards of the new Acropolis Museum. But there is some justification in calling that a special case. Knossos is layered, an archaeological palimpsest and a restoration bricolage, and that is part of the problem.
Cleverly, the Knossos signage cleaves to an essentially Sir Arthur Evans narrative. Although this is couched with qualifiers like, “Evans called this...” or even, “Evans mistakenly believed...” the singular narrative through-line is Knossos as Evans and his generation experienced it and understood it.
It could be argued that this is the best approach for most visitors. It is one step more honest than simply saying, “This is a Lustral Basin” but it doesn’t drag the visitor into the full depths of complexity and confusion.
In the States, the age at which a building can apply for protected landmark status is the ripe old age of fifty. Archaeology can be done — archaeology has been done — where some of the original participants are still alive.
So what is the best way to approach a palimpsest like, say, the Koules guarding the Heraklion harbor? Restore it to the Venetian fort that stood so long, or the Ottoman modifications when they finally took it and, too, produced a grim history in and around it? Restore whatever mute evidence the Second Wold War may have left, or restore it to the Byzantine walls? And do you keep the moule, or do you re-float the Venetian ships that made its foundation and make them your exhibit?
In short, one could almost defend presenting Knossos as the historical efforts of Sir Arthur Evans. But let’s contrast.
There was a Mycenaean complex (probably a fort) on the Acropolis and Cyclopian walls about the heights of The Rock. There were several generations of earlier temples. And there were later, largely civil uses of the centerpiece structure. But against all of this the Periclean Parthenon is both the architectural and artistic height of all the constructions that site has seen, and the symbolic centerpiece of the Athenian democracy and the Greek Classical world.
So it makes sense to restore towards this Ur-Acropolis. But unlike Knossos, where the multiple levels of occupation and (sometimes questionable!) “restoration” are ill-documented at the site, the Parthenon and particularly the new Acropolis Museum carefully and clearly indicate the layers of provenance involved.
(The Provenience of the parts of the Parthenon are, unlike in almost every other archaeological context, quite simple. At least, for the sculpted facade. In modern parlance, the provenience of an artifact is the exact find location. In this case, the sculptures started life on the building. And not in the British Museum, as the exhibits at the Acropolis Museum take pains to point out!)
At the site itself, every tiny fragment of column has been carefully measured and 3D modeled and the correct location determined in the world’s largest picture puzzle. Where the originals are unavailable (lost to time or to Lord Elgin’s luggage) replacements are provided in plaster cast and fresh white marble.
This allows for both appreciation of the total aesthetic — the building as it would have been — and understanding of what parts are historical and what parts (the shining white parts) are not. It is something that Knossos could have benefitted from, except there the story is far more complicated. How does one mark a Dolphin Fresco that Evans had on a wall and modern papers believe was more likely on the floor, and in any case is in the relative safety of a museum with only a replica on site?
The thing is, though, Evans was right. Not in his guesses, but science marches on. Not in his reconstruction efforts — which like earlier efforts at the Acropolis eventually damaged the stone — but, again, the science of restoration marches on. He was right in doing what he did at the time he did it. The site would be gone now, farmland or a condo, if he hadn’t made it something those Victorians could admire and paint and have their photographs taken on as they lined up in the long coats and top hats along some crumbling wall.
There is something to be said for the aesthetics of a ruin. But you get more public attention, more tourist dollars, more help in preservation, if you have something that looks more like a building. I am tempted to say Knossos doesn’t go far enough. There is a virtual replication in the cloud and a place in town where you can rent a tablet and a VR headset and walk around a fully-restored building, bull-leapers and all.
Imagine if something like that was available on site! I’ve seen this. In Berlin (at the grand Museum für Naturkunde) there is a paleontological exhibit where by standing behind a viewing class the dry bones can be clothed in muscle and skin and feathers and placed in their natural habitat. There is an effort somewhere that has a huge collection of those now stark white marble statues that with another press of a button clothes them with light, bringing back the colours of history.
(The new Acropolis Museum makes crafty compromise by displaying in air-conditioned safety the actual Kouros and Kore from the Parthenon but placing beside them small samples of contemporary reconstruction of the original paint job.)
Above all, however, both these places are symbols. Knossos is merely one photogenic touchstone (when taken from exactly the right angle and cropped ever so carefully; the Evans restorations are, when all is said and gone, pitifully small bits of wall and sequences of column). It stands along side of reproductions of the Dolphin Frescoes and Bull Leaper and Bull Rhyton and so on (which also are rather more Victorian restoration than original artifact).
(It is also informative that the “Mask of Agamemnon,” that in many circles is the emblematic and much-reproduced artifact of that peculiar juncture where the Classic and Homeric tradition meet the historical reality, is presented in Athens at the National Museum of Archaeology as just another shaft-grave death mask. But then, much as Knossos is a monument to Sir Arthur, the largest collection in Athens is assembled and presented as, "Here's what Schliemann dug up.")
The Minoans are today a way that Crete reinvents itself as something other than a backwater island in a nation with a broken economy. And of course a way to draw in the tourist dollar. Their imagery is everywhere (I say imagery because the actual artifacts are thin on the ground but reproductions are everywhere, from made-in-China caliber Phaistos Disk reproductions available at every other souvenir stand, to nicer hand-painted miniatures of the Prince of the Lilies, and — moving from not-so-sublime to worthy-of-ridicule — the Court Ladies fresco incorporated into the plastic banner on the Coke stands.)
But there’s no depth in it. No wearing of the mantle of the true progenitor of the Greek Miracle, or at least the past glory of a Minoan Thallasocracy. Now all there is, is the Minoan Bus-Ocracy (Minoan Lines, the most visible of the huge Bus Tour operations that plow through the place like Achilles and his ships on a “foraging” expedition against the defenseless villages of the Anatolian Coast. The tour buses are everywhere, the most visible part of a massive efficient machine that delivers door-to-door from airport to air-conditioned hotel to guided tour, and everything and everyone else must bend to accommodate them.)
It is simply presented as, “This is historical; look at it and be impressed.” The same can be said, alas, for the Cretan’s attempts to share their more recent cultural heritage with the world. “It is traditional,” they say, as if that is enough; no explanation, no context. I can stand on one foot and hum “Barnacle Bill” and call that traditional and it would be, if only for me. If they truly want people to engage with the historic folkcrafts or the nautical tradition or the terrible and inspiring stories of the Cretan Resistance, they need to provide more.
(At Arolithos Traditional Cretan Village they laud their open museum of “living history” displays. They even offer their vision of engagement; for ten Euros your kid can learn a Camp Runnamucka version of the mosaic work the Byzantines brought to such a high peak. But it stops there. One simplistic, one-way presentation. Don’t ask questions.)
What I’m saying is the curation is abysmal. There are few placards and those are uninformative, and to a man or woman the docents are both uniformed about the museum and its subjects and monumentally uninterested in either them or in the act of conversation itself. (Unfortunately this isn’t a peculiarity of museum staff. Shopkeepers also make you work for the privilege to give them your money.)
I do have to say that even the best of the Athenian museums also fall down a bit by world standards. There wasn’t a catalog number in sight. It was hard sometimes to even nail down era or collection. I’d be tempted to say this stems from the embarrassment of riches; the collections are so vast they can only present them in patterns, like “Pots that include an octopus in their decoration.” But that’s another discussion!
What really separates Athens in this sketch here is that the Parthenon is Athens. As Athena herself remains Athena Potnia, the patron saint and protector of the city. The Parthenon is not a place disconnected from current life, like the Palace of Knossos or even the Sinking of the “Elli”; it is effectively the Cathedral of the majority religion. (Not that is functional in any current rituals, or even connected to the professed and officially recognized faiths.)
And I have to stop here and say these aren’t unique issues.
Besides the radically different standards of different museums and monuments worldwide — no nation, no city is without fault — there are basic questions about preservation and accessibility that are not dissimilar to the problems a writer of history (or historical fiction) faces.
There are always market forces. What was important to Athens in the early twentieth century led to what the Parthenon is today. What was inspiring to the Victorians is — as had been the case many times in the past, from Napoleon back through to fifth Dynasty Egyptians — what led to the preservation of what we have today and the interest that raised generations of scholars who would go on to advance our current knowledge.
Monuments and museums have to chase the buck. They have to work within those blurry lines of dramatization and simplification. They have to speak to the viewer whether it is aesthetics or spiritual connection or lessons for the present or (the illusion of?) learning and/or self-actualisation. To do less is to lose the museum, the collection, the monument itself. Athens at least has state support for their grand symbol of the state, but even there money has to come in or the monument doesn't survive.
But beyond serving the needs of the archaeological and historical community, professional and amateur, the museum or monument should, I think, also serve the real needs of the public.
I would like to think the need of most of that public is the sense of transcendence of one’s own mortal lifespan; of being able to walk where the Poets had walked. Of having for a moment a grasp of the boundless. I’d prefer an interest in understanding a different people and different ways, if for no other reason because that helps us to lift our own blinders and for that moment see our own predictions and presumptions as if with alien eyes. But in any case it beats an interest in boasting rights (the selfie-taker infesting modern monuments would be utterly familiar in needs and process and rationale to the Victorians who went to Athens and Rome and, eventually, Crete.)
To speak to that majority audience you need to streamline. You may need to reconstruct or fill in (depending on the circumstance). You need in short to lie, to commit sins both of omission and confabulation.
But that still doesn’t keep me from wanting that other layer to be available. From wanting those access points, from catalog numbers to educated docents, that allow one to drill down beyond the repainted facade to something deeper. Instead my experience across Greece was one of active resistance.
There’s a whole other sideline here about folkloric crafts. There are thriving communities interested in, keeping alive, being inspired by, and otherwise practicing crafts from history or reconstructed from archaeology. It upset me that the points of access were almost nonexistent on Crete despite the several clever and fascinating folkways museums.
Take spinning and weaving. However. There was a small exhibit sponsored by some government agency trying to grow the market for Cretan silk that tried to produce a kit to let you try pulling silken threads from a cocoon yourself. Alas it was badly explained, poorly presented, and none of the exhibiters had any idea how it actually worked.
The one access I got is through something that is recognized as a living craft within a slightly different circle. Even though in large parts of Crete the part of the Cretan Lyre has been taken over by the more flexible and easier-to-obtain violin, there are people who sell and play and build and teach the lyre who are completely open and supportive to the idea of someone new learning the instrument. I suspect (although I haven't the direct experience to prove) that cooking could, within limits, also benefit from coming from a different context that bypasses the blind uncomprehending, "But we have postcards for sale! What else do you want?"
And, yes, as someone fascinated by the practicalities of daily life artifacts, it is disheartening to find at even a good museum — one that recognizes and labels loom weights and spindle whorls — the distinctive and informative linen-spinner’s bowl is left unremarked among a class of general household pottery. Or that a set of actual surviving clay tuyeres is simply labeled “tuyeres,” losing that brazen opportunity to talk about the ingenious period smelting practices.
But this should be no surprise. When the sleek mechanism is designed to ferry the tourist as smoothly and quickly as possible through the monument and into the gift shop, the very concept of dialog is anathema. Only a passive audience can be processed with efficiency. And the shame is that the audience seems largely satisfied. Whatever experience they were seeking, they seem to have gained it somewhere between the massive bus that made sure Cretan soil never touched their pristine footwear, and the hotel amenities that made it as much as possible like any other large hotel anywhere in the world.
The visitor who wants, needs, and can accept more (I saw one visitor at the National in Athens who was getting an expert lecture from his friend, another visitor -- a man I am almost certain was Eric Cline himself!) is the outlier. They have to fend for themselves. The visitor who has moved even further from the mainstream, like the growing groups of historical and folkloric re-creationists, is even more left with no easy access to what they were hoping to find.
And there is no simple answer to this. It is not a fault, per se. Certainly not one of any agency. It is merely a function of how things work, how they -- apparently -- must work, but certainly how they have currently evolved.
And for all of that said....yes, the material is still there, and I got something worthwhile from it.
Here’s the second image. A Turkish powder magazine explodes, delivering the final indignity to the creaking, discolored ruins of Athen’s heart.
Two different cities, two different monuments, two different sets of problems in archaeological restoration and the often complex relationship between a modern nation and their cultural heritage.
Knossos is terribly underfunded. It seems strange at first glance. Athens is scarred by their economic woes; abandoned buildings with gaping windows like rotting teeth in faces covered with graffiti, pavements scored with broken walks and open drains and drifts of garbage. By contrast Heraklion, (from the harbor at least), is clean and modern and wears proudly the remodeling for the 2004 Summer Olympics. Even the tourists look wealthier.
(The contrast is even stronger at Chania. This is basically a sea-side resort town. The history underfoot is barely remarked upon; in a long dockside strip of eateries and bars and trinket shops no signage showed and only a handful of people seemed to know there was a full replica Minoan sailing vessel on display nearby -- among the other archaeological and historical treasures.)
Work has all but stopped at the site of the Palace of Knossos. Down at the Heraklion Museum they speak proudly of the restoration efforts on their collection (which as with so many begins with removing the efforts of the previous generation). But at Knossos itself, the best description of the present efforts is stabilization. Keeping it from disintegrating further before the money for actual work flows in again.
The site is under-documented by the standards of the new Acropolis Museum. But there is some justification in calling that a special case. Knossos is layered, an archaeological palimpsest and a restoration bricolage, and that is part of the problem.
Cleverly, the Knossos signage cleaves to an essentially Sir Arthur Evans narrative. Although this is couched with qualifiers like, “Evans called this...” or even, “Evans mistakenly believed...” the singular narrative through-line is Knossos as Evans and his generation experienced it and understood it.
It could be argued that this is the best approach for most visitors. It is one step more honest than simply saying, “This is a Lustral Basin” but it doesn’t drag the visitor into the full depths of complexity and confusion.
In the States, the age at which a building can apply for protected landmark status is the ripe old age of fifty. Archaeology can be done — archaeology has been done — where some of the original participants are still alive.
So what is the best way to approach a palimpsest like, say, the Koules guarding the Heraklion harbor? Restore it to the Venetian fort that stood so long, or the Ottoman modifications when they finally took it and, too, produced a grim history in and around it? Restore whatever mute evidence the Second Wold War may have left, or restore it to the Byzantine walls? And do you keep the moule, or do you re-float the Venetian ships that made its foundation and make them your exhibit?
In short, one could almost defend presenting Knossos as the historical efforts of Sir Arthur Evans. But let’s contrast.
There was a Mycenaean complex (probably a fort) on the Acropolis and Cyclopian walls about the heights of The Rock. There were several generations of earlier temples. And there were later, largely civil uses of the centerpiece structure. But against all of this the Periclean Parthenon is both the architectural and artistic height of all the constructions that site has seen, and the symbolic centerpiece of the Athenian democracy and the Greek Classical world.
So it makes sense to restore towards this Ur-Acropolis. But unlike Knossos, where the multiple levels of occupation and (sometimes questionable!) “restoration” are ill-documented at the site, the Parthenon and particularly the new Acropolis Museum carefully and clearly indicate the layers of provenance involved.
(The Provenience of the parts of the Parthenon are, unlike in almost every other archaeological context, quite simple. At least, for the sculpted facade. In modern parlance, the provenience of an artifact is the exact find location. In this case, the sculptures started life on the building. And not in the British Museum, as the exhibits at the Acropolis Museum take pains to point out!)
At the site itself, every tiny fragment of column has been carefully measured and 3D modeled and the correct location determined in the world’s largest picture puzzle. Where the originals are unavailable (lost to time or to Lord Elgin’s luggage) replacements are provided in plaster cast and fresh white marble.
This allows for both appreciation of the total aesthetic — the building as it would have been — and understanding of what parts are historical and what parts (the shining white parts) are not. It is something that Knossos could have benefitted from, except there the story is far more complicated. How does one mark a Dolphin Fresco that Evans had on a wall and modern papers believe was more likely on the floor, and in any case is in the relative safety of a museum with only a replica on site?
The thing is, though, Evans was right. Not in his guesses, but science marches on. Not in his reconstruction efforts — which like earlier efforts at the Acropolis eventually damaged the stone — but, again, the science of restoration marches on. He was right in doing what he did at the time he did it. The site would be gone now, farmland or a condo, if he hadn’t made it something those Victorians could admire and paint and have their photographs taken on as they lined up in the long coats and top hats along some crumbling wall.
There is something to be said for the aesthetics of a ruin. But you get more public attention, more tourist dollars, more help in preservation, if you have something that looks more like a building. I am tempted to say Knossos doesn’t go far enough. There is a virtual replication in the cloud and a place in town where you can rent a tablet and a VR headset and walk around a fully-restored building, bull-leapers and all.
Imagine if something like that was available on site! I’ve seen this. In Berlin (at the grand Museum für Naturkunde) there is a paleontological exhibit where by standing behind a viewing class the dry bones can be clothed in muscle and skin and feathers and placed in their natural habitat. There is an effort somewhere that has a huge collection of those now stark white marble statues that with another press of a button clothes them with light, bringing back the colours of history.
(The new Acropolis Museum makes crafty compromise by displaying in air-conditioned safety the actual Kouros and Kore from the Parthenon but placing beside them small samples of contemporary reconstruction of the original paint job.)
Above all, however, both these places are symbols. Knossos is merely one photogenic touchstone (when taken from exactly the right angle and cropped ever so carefully; the Evans restorations are, when all is said and gone, pitifully small bits of wall and sequences of column). It stands along side of reproductions of the Dolphin Frescoes and Bull Leaper and Bull Rhyton and so on (which also are rather more Victorian restoration than original artifact).
(It is also informative that the “Mask of Agamemnon,” that in many circles is the emblematic and much-reproduced artifact of that peculiar juncture where the Classic and Homeric tradition meet the historical reality, is presented in Athens at the National Museum of Archaeology as just another shaft-grave death mask. But then, much as Knossos is a monument to Sir Arthur, the largest collection in Athens is assembled and presented as, "Here's what Schliemann dug up.")
The Minoans are today a way that Crete reinvents itself as something other than a backwater island in a nation with a broken economy. And of course a way to draw in the tourist dollar. Their imagery is everywhere (I say imagery because the actual artifacts are thin on the ground but reproductions are everywhere, from made-in-China caliber Phaistos Disk reproductions available at every other souvenir stand, to nicer hand-painted miniatures of the Prince of the Lilies, and — moving from not-so-sublime to worthy-of-ridicule — the Court Ladies fresco incorporated into the plastic banner on the Coke stands.)
But there’s no depth in it. No wearing of the mantle of the true progenitor of the Greek Miracle, or at least the past glory of a Minoan Thallasocracy. Now all there is, is the Minoan Bus-Ocracy (Minoan Lines, the most visible of the huge Bus Tour operations that plow through the place like Achilles and his ships on a “foraging” expedition against the defenseless villages of the Anatolian Coast. The tour buses are everywhere, the most visible part of a massive efficient machine that delivers door-to-door from airport to air-conditioned hotel to guided tour, and everything and everyone else must bend to accommodate them.)
It is simply presented as, “This is historical; look at it and be impressed.” The same can be said, alas, for the Cretan’s attempts to share their more recent cultural heritage with the world. “It is traditional,” they say, as if that is enough; no explanation, no context. I can stand on one foot and hum “Barnacle Bill” and call that traditional and it would be, if only for me. If they truly want people to engage with the historic folkcrafts or the nautical tradition or the terrible and inspiring stories of the Cretan Resistance, they need to provide more.
(At Arolithos Traditional Cretan Village they laud their open museum of “living history” displays. They even offer their vision of engagement; for ten Euros your kid can learn a Camp Runnamucka version of the mosaic work the Byzantines brought to such a high peak. But it stops there. One simplistic, one-way presentation. Don’t ask questions.)
What I’m saying is the curation is abysmal. There are few placards and those are uninformative, and to a man or woman the docents are both uniformed about the museum and its subjects and monumentally uninterested in either them or in the act of conversation itself. (Unfortunately this isn’t a peculiarity of museum staff. Shopkeepers also make you work for the privilege to give them your money.)
I do have to say that even the best of the Athenian museums also fall down a bit by world standards. There wasn’t a catalog number in sight. It was hard sometimes to even nail down era or collection. I’d be tempted to say this stems from the embarrassment of riches; the collections are so vast they can only present them in patterns, like “Pots that include an octopus in their decoration.” But that’s another discussion!
What really separates Athens in this sketch here is that the Parthenon is Athens. As Athena herself remains Athena Potnia, the patron saint and protector of the city. The Parthenon is not a place disconnected from current life, like the Palace of Knossos or even the Sinking of the “Elli”; it is effectively the Cathedral of the majority religion. (Not that is functional in any current rituals, or even connected to the professed and officially recognized faiths.)
And I have to stop here and say these aren’t unique issues.
Besides the radically different standards of different museums and monuments worldwide — no nation, no city is without fault — there are basic questions about preservation and accessibility that are not dissimilar to the problems a writer of history (or historical fiction) faces.
There are always market forces. What was important to Athens in the early twentieth century led to what the Parthenon is today. What was inspiring to the Victorians is — as had been the case many times in the past, from Napoleon back through to fifth Dynasty Egyptians — what led to the preservation of what we have today and the interest that raised generations of scholars who would go on to advance our current knowledge.
Monuments and museums have to chase the buck. They have to work within those blurry lines of dramatization and simplification. They have to speak to the viewer whether it is aesthetics or spiritual connection or lessons for the present or (the illusion of?) learning and/or self-actualisation. To do less is to lose the museum, the collection, the monument itself. Athens at least has state support for their grand symbol of the state, but even there money has to come in or the monument doesn't survive.
But beyond serving the needs of the archaeological and historical community, professional and amateur, the museum or monument should, I think, also serve the real needs of the public.
I would like to think the need of most of that public is the sense of transcendence of one’s own mortal lifespan; of being able to walk where the Poets had walked. Of having for a moment a grasp of the boundless. I’d prefer an interest in understanding a different people and different ways, if for no other reason because that helps us to lift our own blinders and for that moment see our own predictions and presumptions as if with alien eyes. But in any case it beats an interest in boasting rights (the selfie-taker infesting modern monuments would be utterly familiar in needs and process and rationale to the Victorians who went to Athens and Rome and, eventually, Crete.)
To speak to that majority audience you need to streamline. You may need to reconstruct or fill in (depending on the circumstance). You need in short to lie, to commit sins both of omission and confabulation.
But that still doesn’t keep me from wanting that other layer to be available. From wanting those access points, from catalog numbers to educated docents, that allow one to drill down beyond the repainted facade to something deeper. Instead my experience across Greece was one of active resistance.
There’s a whole other sideline here about folkloric crafts. There are thriving communities interested in, keeping alive, being inspired by, and otherwise practicing crafts from history or reconstructed from archaeology. It upset me that the points of access were almost nonexistent on Crete despite the several clever and fascinating folkways museums.
Take spinning and weaving. However. There was a small exhibit sponsored by some government agency trying to grow the market for Cretan silk that tried to produce a kit to let you try pulling silken threads from a cocoon yourself. Alas it was badly explained, poorly presented, and none of the exhibiters had any idea how it actually worked.
And, yes, as someone fascinated by the practicalities of daily life artifacts, it is disheartening to find at even a good museum — one that recognizes and labels loom weights and spindle whorls — the distinctive and informative linen-spinner’s bowl is left unremarked among a class of general household pottery. Or that a set of actual surviving clay tuyeres is simply labeled “tuyeres,” losing that brazen opportunity to talk about the ingenious period smelting practices.
But this should be no surprise. When the sleek mechanism is designed to ferry the tourist as smoothly and quickly as possible through the monument and into the gift shop, the very concept of dialog is anathema. Only a passive audience can be processed with efficiency. And the shame is that the audience seems largely satisfied. Whatever experience they were seeking, they seem to have gained it somewhere between the massive bus that made sure Cretan soil never touched their pristine footwear, and the hotel amenities that made it as much as possible like any other large hotel anywhere in the world.
The visitor who wants, needs, and can accept more (I saw one visitor at the National in Athens who was getting an expert lecture from his friend, another visitor -- a man I am almost certain was Eric Cline himself!) is the outlier. They have to fend for themselves. The visitor who has moved even further from the mainstream, like the growing groups of historical and folkloric re-creationists, is even more left with no easy access to what they were hoping to find.
And there is no simple answer to this. It is not a fault, per se. Certainly not one of any agency. It is merely a function of how things work, how they -- apparently -- must work, but certainly how they have currently evolved.
And for all of that said....yes, the material is still there, and I got something worthwhile from it.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
The death of pots
Through huge swaths of the archaeological record we have pottery. It enters the record in the Neolithic, and marks the point where humans are able to make a stew (woven baskets carry water with difficulty and burn when held over a fire). They mark the transition to an agricultural economy, with storage of perishables and the making of beer.
The first thing Jaques Coustou noticed when he dove on the wrecks near “The Island of Rabbits” just beyond the harbor of Iraklion was amphorae. They are visible now in a nearby museum; the jugs carrying Cretan wines and other trade goods. And you can tell, instantly, that you are looking at two different eras. The same transport jugs for most probably the same trade goods are distinctly 2nd century AD (enough that I was able to guess without seeing the museum placard first), and as distinctly a different era for a second ship (this one Byzantine).
The pottery forms the most distinct sequencing for most archaeology. Like tree rings it doesnt have an inherent date; it has to be lined up by other methods, from carbon dates of the residue of a wine to the inclusion of a scarab bearing the name of a recorded Pharaoh in the assembage. This makes things interesting for the amatuer, as most of the literature will place an event or occupation or find within the context of the pottery culture; “Proto-Geometric” or “Late Helladic phase II.” And of course there is constant adjustment and argument about where to stick these arbitrary demarkations, and how appropriate they are when applied to trading, polyglot, evolving cultures where pottery of numerous sequences may co-exist and be found in a single assemblage.
One is often tempted to draw too much from the pots. But like Herodotus, it is because that may be most of what we have. One can look back through the history of the field and recognize the way previous eras had viewed the artistic changes through their own lenses. It is too easy even today to reach for “brutal,” or “a crude copy of...” when trying to describe a style. But what alternative do we have to applying our own aesthetic reaction? There are not (despite some valient attempts in the past) easy ways to create metrics for art.
As I strolled though the National I was presented with a series of galleries moving from Post-Mycenaean out to the full glory of the Attic. And if you look through other galleries you can go from Neolithic Cycladian pottery (which has odd similarties to the much, much later proto-gemometric), through Minoan and the rightly-celebrated Kameres Ware (which made its way to Egypt and Syria and the Greek Mainland), and then the Mycenaean transition. And, yes, my reaction is not untypical for the cultural preconceptions I live within; that the first products of the Mycenae workshops were crude reproductions of the High Minoan. There was a Mycenae octopus that reminded me strikingly of anime art done by amatuer fans; tracing the lines without understanding their purpose.
But this is reading intent that may not have been there. Aesthetic intents aside, these were mostly commercial productions and as a long-time theatre person I understand too well how market forces and practical constraints influence the final result. The one thing that is very distinct is when the Mycenae move in the art turns more bloody. The Minoans were fabulous at capturing the line of a bird in flight or a waving frond of sea lilly but the Mycenae were focused on the clash of wills and strength of limbs; a focus on the athletic, martial body that has a visible culmination in the red-figure ware.
So, yes, you look at the proto-geometric and it hard not to think of art that has lost the equivalent of the guilds and academies and is reduced, first to crude attempts to continue, then gives up and goes for equally crude and terribly simplistic geometric scribbles. And then the geometric figures get more complicated and refinments like rulers come in, and what was an idea turns into an oppressive meme, the style taking over, until the entire pot is covered with obsessive tiny details. But in the background, the desire to do figure work is still there. At first all they can handle are silhouettes, and then they start scratching into the black silhouettes to describe muscles and cloth folds and other details in a sort of reverse cartooning.
But this is not fair. It is an impression I, a product of the classical Western art tradition, share with the Renaissance and later artists who celebrated most when their Greek idols came closest to realism. It might not have been until the turn of the century that a new apreciation (as part of that era’s Orientalizing phase), of the free-flowing styalization of the Minoan returned.
And here’s a little personal observation. I learned when trying to draw cartoons that the ruler is not the “better” or “more evolved” approach. A free-hand line has more life and looks better and often describes the world better. And is harder and takes more experience (experience with a ruler, even).
Well, these are very old discussions. Suffice to say that there are distinct changes and there are many fascinating socioogical ideas when can propose from them. And those exist because ceramics are constant and durable. Linear A and B exist for us now because the fires that swept through their respective civilizations baked the soft, malleable, ever-so-handy clay used to make tally marks into nearly indestructable ceramics.
And here’s the thing. At home, I drink from plastic. I cook with metal. My goods come in cans or, again, more plastic. Sure, there are some parallels; plastic comes from a natural substance that is collected and processed. Except petroleum distilllates are a long distance from the clay of a river bank. Anyone can make clay. It takes a hell of a lot more than a village to make plastics; it takes a large-scale industrial civilization.
Plastics last. Regretttably so. There is not a spot on the ocean today where you cant find some. But in what ways will plastics serve future generations of archaeologists?
The first thing Jaques Coustou noticed when he dove on the wrecks near “The Island of Rabbits” just beyond the harbor of Iraklion was amphorae. They are visible now in a nearby museum; the jugs carrying Cretan wines and other trade goods. And you can tell, instantly, that you are looking at two different eras. The same transport jugs for most probably the same trade goods are distinctly 2nd century AD (enough that I was able to guess without seeing the museum placard first), and as distinctly a different era for a second ship (this one Byzantine).
The pottery forms the most distinct sequencing for most archaeology. Like tree rings it doesnt have an inherent date; it has to be lined up by other methods, from carbon dates of the residue of a wine to the inclusion of a scarab bearing the name of a recorded Pharaoh in the assembage. This makes things interesting for the amatuer, as most of the literature will place an event or occupation or find within the context of the pottery culture; “Proto-Geometric” or “Late Helladic phase II.” And of course there is constant adjustment and argument about where to stick these arbitrary demarkations, and how appropriate they are when applied to trading, polyglot, evolving cultures where pottery of numerous sequences may co-exist and be found in a single assemblage.
One is often tempted to draw too much from the pots. But like Herodotus, it is because that may be most of what we have. One can look back through the history of the field and recognize the way previous eras had viewed the artistic changes through their own lenses. It is too easy even today to reach for “brutal,” or “a crude copy of...” when trying to describe a style. But what alternative do we have to applying our own aesthetic reaction? There are not (despite some valient attempts in the past) easy ways to create metrics for art.
As I strolled though the National I was presented with a series of galleries moving from Post-Mycenaean out to the full glory of the Attic. And if you look through other galleries you can go from Neolithic Cycladian pottery (which has odd similarties to the much, much later proto-gemometric), through Minoan and the rightly-celebrated Kameres Ware (which made its way to Egypt and Syria and the Greek Mainland), and then the Mycenaean transition. And, yes, my reaction is not untypical for the cultural preconceptions I live within; that the first products of the Mycenae workshops were crude reproductions of the High Minoan. There was a Mycenae octopus that reminded me strikingly of anime art done by amatuer fans; tracing the lines without understanding their purpose.
But this is reading intent that may not have been there. Aesthetic intents aside, these were mostly commercial productions and as a long-time theatre person I understand too well how market forces and practical constraints influence the final result. The one thing that is very distinct is when the Mycenae move in the art turns more bloody. The Minoans were fabulous at capturing the line of a bird in flight or a waving frond of sea lilly but the Mycenae were focused on the clash of wills and strength of limbs; a focus on the athletic, martial body that has a visible culmination in the red-figure ware.
So, yes, you look at the proto-geometric and it hard not to think of art that has lost the equivalent of the guilds and academies and is reduced, first to crude attempts to continue, then gives up and goes for equally crude and terribly simplistic geometric scribbles. And then the geometric figures get more complicated and refinments like rulers come in, and what was an idea turns into an oppressive meme, the style taking over, until the entire pot is covered with obsessive tiny details. But in the background, the desire to do figure work is still there. At first all they can handle are silhouettes, and then they start scratching into the black silhouettes to describe muscles and cloth folds and other details in a sort of reverse cartooning.
But this is not fair. It is an impression I, a product of the classical Western art tradition, share with the Renaissance and later artists who celebrated most when their Greek idols came closest to realism. It might not have been until the turn of the century that a new apreciation (as part of that era’s Orientalizing phase), of the free-flowing styalization of the Minoan returned.
And here’s a little personal observation. I learned when trying to draw cartoons that the ruler is not the “better” or “more evolved” approach. A free-hand line has more life and looks better and often describes the world better. And is harder and takes more experience (experience with a ruler, even).
Well, these are very old discussions. Suffice to say that there are distinct changes and there are many fascinating socioogical ideas when can propose from them. And those exist because ceramics are constant and durable. Linear A and B exist for us now because the fires that swept through their respective civilizations baked the soft, malleable, ever-so-handy clay used to make tally marks into nearly indestructable ceramics.
And here’s the thing. At home, I drink from plastic. I cook with metal. My goods come in cans or, again, more plastic. Sure, there are some parallels; plastic comes from a natural substance that is collected and processed. Except petroleum distilllates are a long distance from the clay of a river bank. Anyone can make clay. It takes a hell of a lot more than a village to make plastics; it takes a large-scale industrial civilization.
Plastics last. Regretttably so. There is not a spot on the ocean today where you cant find some. But in what ways will plastics serve future generations of archaeologists?
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Hoo New
Couldn't leave it alone. If you look carefully at the pic above, I not only swapped out the brass tuning pins for proper zither pins, but took the excuse to re-drill for seven strings instead of six.
Which involved shaving very tiny dowels out of the red oak and gluing them into the old holes, but anyhow. Also re-carved the bridge and made a new tailpiece. Even tied on proper tailpiece knots (although would work better if the holes were spaced further back).
(I also have to say I like the sound of the metal-wound nylon string better than the bare nylon ones.)
What changes? A few more melodies open up. Especially if I use "pinch harmonics" to get that octave. And I can play triads for all the notes of the major scale (with necessary inversions; the VII chord has the root on the top). On the downside, I practically have to play the seventh degree on the I chord because otherwise there's two dead "plunks" at the top of the strum.
This is the spot where you really start to learn about the functionality of the instrument. I've been working with it, finding different ways to play it, seeing how to record it. I have to say I find the string noise a bit objectionable, especially in the strum. That's something that in many musical cultures is considered a feature not a bug. Musicologists write of the "percussive effect of the strum" when reconstructing performance practice for a Sutton Hoo-type lyre.
So, yeah. Next instrument, proper tonewoods. A larger sound cavity, a thinner back. Larger wouldn't hurt and make sure the midpoint of the strings is fully exposed for easier harmonics. Also flatten the curve of the pins. Calculate the tone hole (and put a rosette in it).
Okay: tuning up a whole step helped, as did going to a leather pick (in the example below, leather pick, nail strum in the traditional way, finger strum, and finger picking.)
Still, I'm unlikely to do a second Sutton Hoo. Might do a Trossingham, or a Celtic Lyre. Or a harp. Or one of two fictional instruments. Such as:
Traditional Vulcan Lyre: Assume that the contemporary (contemporary with Spock) instrument is an electric with a highly modified sound. Go back into the instrument's history to project what it might have been as a strictly acoustic instrument. Were the strings gathered at a single-point bridge and was there a tremolo knob (as is apparently the case with the Kithara?) Were there drone strings?
Goddess Harp: I am still puzzled by how to make this acoustic, whilst staying as close as possible to in-game depiction. For instance, since the strings appear to attached directly to the crossbar, the tuners might want to be hidden inside the body. So what is the soundboard? Is it the upper curve? (It feels like this is curved too much to be acoustically viable. Sure, a violin has a curved soundboard, but the Goddess Harp represents a smaller, more highly shaped area, with a much sharper curve.) Or is the soundboard hidden inside, along the frontal plane?
I'm tempted to design some test rigs. But later. Much later. At the moment I have an instrument and I have the music I meant to make with it loaded into Reaper.
Thursday, October 11, 2018
Sutton Hoo
Sometime in the 7th century an Anglian King was buried in his ship on the banks of a river in Suffolk, England. Most people will remember the Sutton Hoo helmet (which is on display at the British Museum.)
There were also sufficient fragments to reconstruct a lyre. Unlike the Greek Kithara with the separate crossbar this is a compact rectangular instrument that gives the appearance of being made from a single plank.
The historical playing style, as reconstructed by Master Dofinn-Hallr Morrisson, is that it is strummed with the right hand (plectrum or backstroke with the nails) whilst the support hand mutes selected strings autoharp style. It can also be plucked from the right hand, and a modern master has demonstrated drone plucking with the left thumb as well as pinch harmonics.
Acoustically, it is a cigar-box guitar without a fretboard. Which I expect would make it relatively robust to changes in dimension and shape. Most people who have made a Sutton Hoo-style lyre have modified them in various ways for ease of play and ease of construction. I borrowed several elements from other lyre builders for this my first build, relying largely on instructions made freely available by David Friedman/Cariadoc.
And, yes, I dream about grain-matched sapele and torrefied sitka spruce but I decided to make this a budget build; fast and cheap.
MATERIALS:
White Pine: a short plank of 1 x 12. The most common (and cheapest) lumber at any store.
Basswood (linden): an eighth-inch thick hobby board (8" x 24") from Orchard Supply Store.
Red Cedar: another OSH hobby board, quarter inch thick and 2" wide.
Brass rod: one eight inch, also from OSH's hobby supplies.
A pack of cheap acoustic guitar strings from Starving Musician.
Total materials about fifteen bucks. (Staining and finishing adds a bit, but the instrument plays fine without all that).
BODY:
First step was drawing out. I scaled Cariadoc's outer dimensions (8" x 30") to the wood I had, then after drawing it checked to make sure I could still get a hand inside. In case you are wondering, I went for 6" x 17", with 3/4" side rails (cut back to 1/2" inside the soundbox). That gives it roughly the scale length of a ukulele.
There's two basic ways to make the soundbox on this; either cut out a hole and cover front and back with solid pieces of wood (quarter inch for the back...and I'll discuss the soundboard soon enough). Or you can carve out the cavity. I chose to do it the quick and dirty way. The two long boards in the picture here are guides to keep the router from flying through the side walls should I slip.
(Later in the rout I added a top board and adjusted the plunge; otherwise the unsupported router can tip into the gap you are carving and ruin the piece.)
Three passes with the router, and a tiny bit of clean-up with a wood rasp, and the soundbox is made.
Next was cutting out the hand hole. Typical jigsaw work. (I'm spoiled; I also have bandsaw and scrollsaw available.)
After all the holes were done I used table saw and chopsaw to take the original plank down to dimension, bandsaw to rough out the ends, then bench sander to round things off properly. The interior cut, alas, had to be approached with hand rasp.
White pine is strong enough in these dimensions, especially for "gut" (nylon) stringing. The go-to wood is ash, although spruce, maple, cedar, yew and others are all nice alternatives. Plywood will work as well; again, this structure is under small enough stresses that regular plywood will handle it. It won't sound as good, of course, but it can sound good enough.
SOUNDBOARD:
Rough-cut the soundboard to slightly over the dimensions of the body, and pre-cut a sound hole. The Sutton Hoo lyres did not use a sound hole but several modern versions do.
I made mine an arbitrary size and position -- I went for roughly a third, as the third has magical properties in musical instruments (directly center you risk amplifying the primary resonance node of the body. And, yes, you can calculate the resonance frequency of the cavity. There's a simple formulae many luthiers use for sound hole size but it is based on an ideal Helmholtz resonator. Later papers show the critical factor is actually the length of the edge, not the area of the hole (which is why rosettes work, and why a violin has f-holes).
Basically, soundboard is like the head of a drum, and is where much of the volume is coming from. Cutting a hole allows the air inside the sound cavity to communicate with the outside, raising the volume but also changing the timbre (favoring the lower frequencies).
This is why you want a nice wood for the soundboard. Basswood is technically a hardwood and has been used for tonewood, but the best vote for it is that it is better than plywood.
There's an extra bit here. Pine and basswood are softer woods and might not support a tuning pin. As with other builders, I reinforced the crossbar with another wood (the red cedar). Routed down the thickness of the plank, stuck it in, glued down everything. I could have used more clamps.
TAILPIECE:
There are a number of different ways you can fasten the dead end of the strings. I followed another Sutton Hoo builder in carving a simple tailpiece out of red cedar. For simplicity in build I drove a dowel (actually, a piece cut off the end of a cheap foam brush) into the heel (where I'd intentionally made the wall a little thicker just for this. The tailpiece is fastened to this heel peg with a loop of steel wire.
The bridge is also carved from that same budget-stretching chunk of red cedar.
Actually, three bridges. Basically, all sound comes from the vibrating string. But a string has a small cross-section. It moves very little air. To get a performance-level sound you need an impedance matcher. It's the same thing that causes a trumpet to have a bell. The soundboard provides the large area to shove air. The bridge acoustically couples the string to the soundboard.
And it is a dance. The violin bridge is thin and flexible because it is designed to steal the maximum energy from the string. A violin string is continuously energized and has very little sustain. Volume is a trade-off for sustain.
So my first bridge was too low. The second used a nut-and-saddle arrangement like a guitar bridge; the hard contact point steals less energy from the string meaning longer sustain but less volume. But that didn't sound good. So the final bridge was raw red cedar, and I'm shaving it down to be thinner and more responsive today.
Position is also critical. Unlike a guitar, I chose a captive bridge arrangement; it is held in place only by the tension of the strings.
STRINGING:
Yes, this is out of order. You don't need to stain and varnish your instrument in order to try playing it. Period instruments weren't. Well, not really (a little linseed oil at least).
For this build I put a knot in the end of each string and passed them through a hole in the tailpiece. Next build I'll try a bridge knot. Then wrapped around the tuning pin and through the hole. Get them all on and then stand up the bridge under them.
A nice benefit to the short scale length is I could get two courses from each guitar string. So this is strung with the top three strings of a nylon acoustic set; the G, the B, and the E (Gather Before Elrond).
The lyre is tuned diatonically, often omitting the second scale degree (aka for C Major you'd tune C, D, E, F, G, A) Also often inverted, starting on the third or fourth degree. I tuned mine to A Major, included the second, and since like all my examples it only has six strings that means I have no seventh.
Seven strings is better. Seven strings means you can play many melodies (just transpose down the octave) and you can "fret" all the triads of the major scale (with the appropriate inversions).
FINISHING:
There were also sufficient fragments to reconstruct a lyre. Unlike the Greek Kithara with the separate crossbar this is a compact rectangular instrument that gives the appearance of being made from a single plank.
The historical playing style, as reconstructed by Master Dofinn-Hallr Morrisson, is that it is strummed with the right hand (plectrum or backstroke with the nails) whilst the support hand mutes selected strings autoharp style. It can also be plucked from the right hand, and a modern master has demonstrated drone plucking with the left thumb as well as pinch harmonics.
Acoustically, it is a cigar-box guitar without a fretboard. Which I expect would make it relatively robust to changes in dimension and shape. Most people who have made a Sutton Hoo-style lyre have modified them in various ways for ease of play and ease of construction. I borrowed several elements from other lyre builders for this my first build, relying largely on instructions made freely available by David Friedman/Cariadoc.
And, yes, I dream about grain-matched sapele and torrefied sitka spruce but I decided to make this a budget build; fast and cheap.
MATERIALS:
White Pine: a short plank of 1 x 12. The most common (and cheapest) lumber at any store.
Basswood (linden): an eighth-inch thick hobby board (8" x 24") from Orchard Supply Store.
Red Cedar: another OSH hobby board, quarter inch thick and 2" wide.
Brass rod: one eight inch, also from OSH's hobby supplies.
A pack of cheap acoustic guitar strings from Starving Musician.
Total materials about fifteen bucks. (Staining and finishing adds a bit, but the instrument plays fine without all that).
BODY:
First step was drawing out. I scaled Cariadoc's outer dimensions (8" x 30") to the wood I had, then after drawing it checked to make sure I could still get a hand inside. In case you are wondering, I went for 6" x 17", with 3/4" side rails (cut back to 1/2" inside the soundbox). That gives it roughly the scale length of a ukulele.
There's two basic ways to make the soundbox on this; either cut out a hole and cover front and back with solid pieces of wood (quarter inch for the back...and I'll discuss the soundboard soon enough). Or you can carve out the cavity. I chose to do it the quick and dirty way. The two long boards in the picture here are guides to keep the router from flying through the side walls should I slip.
(Later in the rout I added a top board and adjusted the plunge; otherwise the unsupported router can tip into the gap you are carving and ruin the piece.)
Three passes with the router, and a tiny bit of clean-up with a wood rasp, and the soundbox is made.
Next was cutting out the hand hole. Typical jigsaw work. (I'm spoiled; I also have bandsaw and scrollsaw available.)
After all the holes were done I used table saw and chopsaw to take the original plank down to dimension, bandsaw to rough out the ends, then bench sander to round things off properly. The interior cut, alas, had to be approached with hand rasp.
White pine is strong enough in these dimensions, especially for "gut" (nylon) stringing. The go-to wood is ash, although spruce, maple, cedar, yew and others are all nice alternatives. Plywood will work as well; again, this structure is under small enough stresses that regular plywood will handle it. It won't sound as good, of course, but it can sound good enough.
SOUNDBOARD:
Rough-cut the soundboard to slightly over the dimensions of the body, and pre-cut a sound hole. The Sutton Hoo lyres did not use a sound hole but several modern versions do.
I made mine an arbitrary size and position -- I went for roughly a third, as the third has magical properties in musical instruments (directly center you risk amplifying the primary resonance node of the body. And, yes, you can calculate the resonance frequency of the cavity. There's a simple formulae many luthiers use for sound hole size but it is based on an ideal Helmholtz resonator. Later papers show the critical factor is actually the length of the edge, not the area of the hole (which is why rosettes work, and why a violin has f-holes).
Basically, soundboard is like the head of a drum, and is where much of the volume is coming from. Cutting a hole allows the air inside the sound cavity to communicate with the outside, raising the volume but also changing the timbre (favoring the lower frequencies).
This is why you want a nice wood for the soundboard. Basswood is technically a hardwood and has been used for tonewood, but the best vote for it is that it is better than plywood.
There's an extra bit here. Pine and basswood are softer woods and might not support a tuning pin. As with other builders, I reinforced the crossbar with another wood (the red cedar). Routed down the thickness of the plank, stuck it in, glued down everything. I could have used more clamps.
TAILPIECE:
There are a number of different ways you can fasten the dead end of the strings. I followed another Sutton Hoo builder in carving a simple tailpiece out of red cedar. For simplicity in build I drove a dowel (actually, a piece cut off the end of a cheap foam brush) into the heel (where I'd intentionally made the wall a little thicker just for this. The tailpiece is fastened to this heel peg with a loop of steel wire.
The original tailpiece had this decorative hole. For strength I replaced it with a solid tailpiece. I've seen a bunch of different ways of tying on the strings but I haven't found one I like yet. Also, the test fit used leather laces. Those snapped. I tried a braided cord and that creeped. So now it is steel wire.
TUNING PINS:
The go-to for amateur luthiers is the zither pin; cheap, easy to install, holds well and doesn't take up a lot of space. It is what harps use, even the harp inside a piano. I was in a hurry and wanted to see if this could be done on a budget so I went for hand-fabricated brass.
Simple; cut out lengths of rod, pounded one end flat on the anvil, drilled a hole, the chucked it in a drill and "lathed" a rough point on the other end. Drilled a size too small and pounded them in with a block of wood.
BRIDGE
The bridge is also carved from that same budget-stretching chunk of red cedar.
Actually, three bridges. Basically, all sound comes from the vibrating string. But a string has a small cross-section. It moves very little air. To get a performance-level sound you need an impedance matcher. It's the same thing that causes a trumpet to have a bell. The soundboard provides the large area to shove air. The bridge acoustically couples the string to the soundboard.
And it is a dance. The violin bridge is thin and flexible because it is designed to steal the maximum energy from the string. A violin string is continuously energized and has very little sustain. Volume is a trade-off for sustain.
So my first bridge was too low. The second used a nut-and-saddle arrangement like a guitar bridge; the hard contact point steals less energy from the string meaning longer sustain but less volume. But that didn't sound good. So the final bridge was raw red cedar, and I'm shaving it down to be thinner and more responsive today.
Position is also critical. Unlike a guitar, I chose a captive bridge arrangement; it is held in place only by the tension of the strings.
STRINGING:
For this build I put a knot in the end of each string and passed them through a hole in the tailpiece. Next build I'll try a bridge knot. Then wrapped around the tuning pin and through the hole. Get them all on and then stand up the bridge under them.
A nice benefit to the short scale length is I could get two courses from each guitar string. So this is strung with the top three strings of a nylon acoustic set; the G, the B, and the E (Gather Before Elrond).
The lyre is tuned diatonically, often omitting the second scale degree (aka for C Major you'd tune C, D, E, F, G, A) Also often inverted, starting on the third or fourth degree. I tuned mine to A Major, included the second, and since like all my examples it only has six strings that means I have no seventh.
Seven strings is better. Seven strings means you can play many melodies (just transpose down the octave) and you can "fret" all the triads of the major scale (with the appropriate inversions).
FINISHING:
This is more a "lessons learned" for me. It is really hard to tell when you've got the scratches out on softwoods. I sanded like heck, stained, and only then discovered a bunch more scratches. Sanded out the scratches, tried a different stain, and it made a lovely ancient-wood look but in the end I went for a darker serious instrument look.
And really, I hurried too much. And no -- polyurethane is fast but it deadens the sound a little. Shellac next time.
Next time. Hardwoods, perhaps tuning pegs. Seven strings or better (historical depictions show a break around seven strings; either they have fewer and are played strum-and-block, or they have more and are played plucked like a harp, front-and-back-hand style).
Rosette because why not (when I have a laser, after all).
But, really, I've learned what I need from a Sutton Hoo. It is time to build a different lyre, or perhaps a proper harp...
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Wandring minstrel I
The Mini-Hoo is done.
My only real disappointment is that I made it with six strings (most of the makers I was following had used six strings on theirs.) Seven strings would allow me to do a bunch more melodies and all of the major triads (in the appropriate inversions) of a major scale.
This was all about the learning. I built it cheap, mostly because I didn't want to waste time and money on something that might not work at all, but also to see if it could be done. And, yes; for about $15 in supplies and a couple afternoons work I got an instrument that doesn't sound too bad.
I've never built an instrument from scratch. There's a thing about experience that goes beyond the itemized and the strictly quantifiable; a gut sense of fabrication times and achievable tolerances and material variance and structural strength and stress patterns and failure modes. I had it in wood and basic woodworking. Now I have some of that in instrument building.
The first tailpiece hitch was leather cord. That snapped. The second was nylon string. That stretched. Now it is wire and I can tune it up to pitch. So that's a nice idea of the stresses and the material qualities required to withstand them. The hand-made brass tuning pins are right on the edge; when I tune to AMaj they are starting to creep. I'll be dropping in zither pins when I remove the revised bridge for finishing.
So that's a few learning experiences already. I went through three bridges; the first turned out to be too short when I changed how the strings were set into the tailpiece. The second had a brass rod for a nut to get the maximum sustain out of the strings. But then I decided I wanted volume instead, so I pulled the brass and reshaped the red oak of the bridge and it now has a decent sound. And if I shaved it thinner, it will be even less sustain but also change the tonal qualities (I hope, in a positive direction).
That, and moving the bridge around a lot, plus strumming in different places, to try and get an idea of what is going on in the interaction of all those elements.
Oh, and as one instrument builder put it, even a plywood soundboard will sound nicer when you tune the instrument higher...up until the moment it implodes. I can get lower tones easy enough, but it didn't get a nice sound until it was pitched up around ukulele pitches. Which sorta makes sense as the scale length is about ukulele size, too.
So, yeah, white pine is strong enough for this, and basswood (linden) makes a decent soundboard, but now I have a more focused instinct for what is asked of the materials and now I wouldn't dare use anything but a hardwood (or at least baltic birch ply) for a Celtic Harp. And I think I know how a decent tonewood would improve on the sound of an instrument like this one.
Even the varnish matters. I used polyurethane and yes I can hear the difference. Fortunately, for this instrument and my tastes, the changes aren't all bad.
I did this instrument entirely without math, and there are ways to figure out optimum string lengths and bridge placement and tone hole size but, you know, a good structure and a proper sound cavity and you can get a decent sound off a rather surprising variety of proportions.
Next post (probably!) the actual build, and sound samples.
My only real disappointment is that I made it with six strings (most of the makers I was following had used six strings on theirs.) Seven strings would allow me to do a bunch more melodies and all of the major triads (in the appropriate inversions) of a major scale.
This was all about the learning. I built it cheap, mostly because I didn't want to waste time and money on something that might not work at all, but also to see if it could be done. And, yes; for about $15 in supplies and a couple afternoons work I got an instrument that doesn't sound too bad.
I've never built an instrument from scratch. There's a thing about experience that goes beyond the itemized and the strictly quantifiable; a gut sense of fabrication times and achievable tolerances and material variance and structural strength and stress patterns and failure modes. I had it in wood and basic woodworking. Now I have some of that in instrument building.
The first tailpiece hitch was leather cord. That snapped. The second was nylon string. That stretched. Now it is wire and I can tune it up to pitch. So that's a nice idea of the stresses and the material qualities required to withstand them. The hand-made brass tuning pins are right on the edge; when I tune to AMaj they are starting to creep. I'll be dropping in zither pins when I remove the revised bridge for finishing.
So that's a few learning experiences already. I went through three bridges; the first turned out to be too short when I changed how the strings were set into the tailpiece. The second had a brass rod for a nut to get the maximum sustain out of the strings. But then I decided I wanted volume instead, so I pulled the brass and reshaped the red oak of the bridge and it now has a decent sound. And if I shaved it thinner, it will be even less sustain but also change the tonal qualities (I hope, in a positive direction).
That, and moving the bridge around a lot, plus strumming in different places, to try and get an idea of what is going on in the interaction of all those elements.
Oh, and as one instrument builder put it, even a plywood soundboard will sound nicer when you tune the instrument higher...up until the moment it implodes. I can get lower tones easy enough, but it didn't get a nice sound until it was pitched up around ukulele pitches. Which sorta makes sense as the scale length is about ukulele size, too.
So, yeah, white pine is strong enough for this, and basswood (linden) makes a decent soundboard, but now I have a more focused instinct for what is asked of the materials and now I wouldn't dare use anything but a hardwood (or at least baltic birch ply) for a Celtic Harp. And I think I know how a decent tonewood would improve on the sound of an instrument like this one.
Even the varnish matters. I used polyurethane and yes I can hear the difference. Fortunately, for this instrument and my tastes, the changes aren't all bad.
I did this instrument entirely without math, and there are ways to figure out optimum string lengths and bridge placement and tone hole size but, you know, a good structure and a proper sound cavity and you can get a decent sound off a rather surprising variety of proportions.
Next post (probably!) the actual build, and sound samples.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Talk to the thumb
Wood stain is drying on my Sutton Hoo. I will not be surprised if the tuning pegs don't hold or the tailpiece snaps when I put it under tension, but no biggie. I have proper zither pins arriving Monday. The only reason I went with the brass pins is I wanted to see if it made a sound before I wasted a lot of time doing the finish work.
So I guess it makes sense I've started a Reaper file for "Uncharted Worlds" (the music that plays in the galaxy map and planet probe screen of all the Mass Effect games). The process is a little different on this one; found a MIDI file that seems close enough. Spent the afternoon finding voicing for it that matched the capabilities of my available instruments. And tried the top one (the ukulele part). Not too bad.
(Toughest part is my violin-trained instinct is to fret each upcoming note as soon as possible. For a guitar or uke part you may want to stay fretted in order to let the note sustain.)
Yes, there's a link. I started thinking about baby harps and similar when I realized "Uncharted Worlds" would need more and distinct voices than I currently own. And that got me thinking about instrument kits and one thing led to another...and there will be a fully detailed post on my new instrument when it is done and functional and I've had a chance to record a sample off it.
Bass practice is ongoing for the Hellboy cover. My thumb finally listened to me (I think it was changing my position; took off the neck strap and propped the bass on a leg instead. That freed my plucking hand from a support role.) So anyhow the thumb slide method is working for me now. Still some issues damping the D string but it is much less problematic than that A.
Yeah; on listen through playback other than headphones the test bass part I recorded really wasn't working for me. I need that finger plucked sound and I need to control the excess resonance. And that means learning proper bass technique.
And speaking of a Link:
While I was looking at various people's DIY harps and lyres I ran across builds of the "Goddess Harp" from Zelda: Skyward Sword. It is a nice-looking piece but I'm not sure how to make a functional harp from it.
Here's the sitch. The definition of "harp" is strings running perpendicular to the soundboard: in fact, they terminate in the soundboard. The lyre family -- as well as lutes and zithers -- have strings that run parallel to the soundboard and they acoustically couple to it via the bridge. (Think of a lyre as a guitar without a fretboard, and a zither as a guitar without a fretboard or a neck).
All of these work -- aka, project with volume and a good tone -- because there is a resonant cavity under the soundboard. For a guitar, that's the body of the instrument; try playing an electric guitar unplugged and you'll see exactly what that body does.
So the shape of the upper part of the Zelda harp is like a Kithara, the early Greek lyre. The strings terminate on a crosspiece which is suspended between two horns. However, in a Kithara the horns project from a soundbox -- the lower body -- with a bridge and tailpiece.. The Zelda harp is basically a croissant shape and the strings terminate along the inner curve as if it were a harp.
This would have lousy acoustics. Best I can think of is hide a soundboard inside, and then provide an opening for the sound to get out. There's also the issue of the crosspiece but builders have flattened that and added traditional tuning pegs to it without seriously harming the aesthetics of the instrument.
One alternative would be to make it an electric harp. Trouble is, you have to stick a pickup on every single string, unless they terminate in a single resonating piece (like, say...a soundboard).
Or go completely out of physical acoustics and make a laser harp. You could even stick a laser smoke generator in the body and even 5mW lasers would become visible. I think green lasers would look nice with the gold finish. Of course once you've started adding lights...why not make the harp body glow (gold, of course) as well?
But that gets into a completely different kind of project. One I could do. It is rather annoying, really; I've spent several decades collecting an eclectic set of skills from sculpture to fabrication to electronics and I would be entirely comfortable in approaching such a project. But I'm really more interested in learning the basics of acoustic instruments right now.
(Which also leaves out the Vulcan Lyre; although you could build an archtop, both the body shape and the canonical sound produced argues for it to be heavily electronic. Also, it is even more popular than the Zelda harp and there are at least two really excellent ones made by professional luthiers already.)
Say, I wonder if there are other fictional instruments of the string family? (Yes, there's the Skyrim lute, but I've watched a build of it and it is basically a shallow guitar with a lot of extra gingerbread.) I might be tempted to do that one but only as an electric and with full CNC.
Which is also a direction I'm going of late. Sure, it is fun to putter around a woodshop hand-shaping little bits of hardwood, but these days I'd just as soon leverage every labor-saving, time-saving, technological enhancement available. That's the thing I'm proudest about my Mini-Hoo, at least so far; that it took two afternoons to build (and one of them was mostly the sanding).
So I guess it makes sense I've started a Reaper file for "Uncharted Worlds" (the music that plays in the galaxy map and planet probe screen of all the Mass Effect games). The process is a little different on this one; found a MIDI file that seems close enough. Spent the afternoon finding voicing for it that matched the capabilities of my available instruments. And tried the top one (the ukulele part). Not too bad.
(Toughest part is my violin-trained instinct is to fret each upcoming note as soon as possible. For a guitar or uke part you may want to stay fretted in order to let the note sustain.)
Yes, there's a link. I started thinking about baby harps and similar when I realized "Uncharted Worlds" would need more and distinct voices than I currently own. And that got me thinking about instrument kits and one thing led to another...and there will be a fully detailed post on my new instrument when it is done and functional and I've had a chance to record a sample off it.
Bass practice is ongoing for the Hellboy cover. My thumb finally listened to me (I think it was changing my position; took off the neck strap and propped the bass on a leg instead. That freed my plucking hand from a support role.) So anyhow the thumb slide method is working for me now. Still some issues damping the D string but it is much less problematic than that A.
Yeah; on listen through playback other than headphones the test bass part I recorded really wasn't working for me. I need that finger plucked sound and I need to control the excess resonance. And that means learning proper bass technique.
And speaking of a Link:
While I was looking at various people's DIY harps and lyres I ran across builds of the "Goddess Harp" from Zelda: Skyward Sword. It is a nice-looking piece but I'm not sure how to make a functional harp from it.
Here's the sitch. The definition of "harp" is strings running perpendicular to the soundboard: in fact, they terminate in the soundboard. The lyre family -- as well as lutes and zithers -- have strings that run parallel to the soundboard and they acoustically couple to it via the bridge. (Think of a lyre as a guitar without a fretboard, and a zither as a guitar without a fretboard or a neck).
All of these work -- aka, project with volume and a good tone -- because there is a resonant cavity under the soundboard. For a guitar, that's the body of the instrument; try playing an electric guitar unplugged and you'll see exactly what that body does.
So the shape of the upper part of the Zelda harp is like a Kithara, the early Greek lyre. The strings terminate on a crosspiece which is suspended between two horns. However, in a Kithara the horns project from a soundbox -- the lower body -- with a bridge and tailpiece.. The Zelda harp is basically a croissant shape and the strings terminate along the inner curve as if it were a harp.
This would have lousy acoustics. Best I can think of is hide a soundboard inside, and then provide an opening for the sound to get out. There's also the issue of the crosspiece but builders have flattened that and added traditional tuning pegs to it without seriously harming the aesthetics of the instrument.
One alternative would be to make it an electric harp. Trouble is, you have to stick a pickup on every single string, unless they terminate in a single resonating piece (like, say...a soundboard).
Or go completely out of physical acoustics and make a laser harp. You could even stick a laser smoke generator in the body and even 5mW lasers would become visible. I think green lasers would look nice with the gold finish. Of course once you've started adding lights...why not make the harp body glow (gold, of course) as well?
But that gets into a completely different kind of project. One I could do. It is rather annoying, really; I've spent several decades collecting an eclectic set of skills from sculpture to fabrication to electronics and I would be entirely comfortable in approaching such a project. But I'm really more interested in learning the basics of acoustic instruments right now.
(Which also leaves out the Vulcan Lyre; although you could build an archtop, both the body shape and the canonical sound produced argues for it to be heavily electronic. Also, it is even more popular than the Zelda harp and there are at least two really excellent ones made by professional luthiers already.)
Say, I wonder if there are other fictional instruments of the string family? (Yes, there's the Skyrim lute, but I've watched a build of it and it is basically a shallow guitar with a lot of extra gingerbread.) I might be tempted to do that one but only as an electric and with full CNC.
Which is also a direction I'm going of late. Sure, it is fun to putter around a woodshop hand-shaping little bits of hardwood, but these days I'd just as soon leverage every labor-saving, time-saving, technological enhancement available. That's the thing I'm proudest about my Mini-Hoo, at least so far; that it took two afternoons to build (and one of them was mostly the sanding).
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Who is a liar
Stay tuned...new project reaching the final stages. Assuming nothing goes wrong I'll be writing it up as an Instructable.
Friday, October 5, 2018
Coming to blows
Spent a whole practice session doing nothing but playing the same note over and over. With a tuner in front of me.
And it worked. Felt an immediate improvement. Seems that the burbling I'd been getting was me hitting the edge of the slot. Once I was focused on the pitch center, I could also start playing with tone; I'm finding the shifts in mouth shape and tongue position that give a darker, softer tone, or a more focused, brighter tone.
Oh, yeah. And like with the violin, when you hit the pitch center dead on there's a sympathetic resonance you can hear and feel.
But it's silly to wait until I'm "good enough" to record parts, because I'll never be satisfied. I'll learn more, and have more fun doing it, if I record now.
Above is a proof-of-concept draft: I recorded the horn part "wild"; over a portable mic, in the woodshop, without even a metronome. Once I put it in the working file I immediately realized the straight-up bass didn't work; what blended was the fake upright technique (thumb pluck and damping the strings near the bridge with the heel of the plucking hand).
And I had a bad moment when the piano didn't work at all. And I'd already tried organ and even guitar. But electric piano -- especially when I shifted from brushed snare to a brush hi-hat figure -- made a blend I liked.
So now I can work on solving the rest of the arrangement. And continue rehearsing the parts (the bass needs the most practice).
Picture from Ukulele Underground
The Hellboy cover is a very different direction. It is pushing instruments I don't know yet how to blend properly, or how to play properly. I want to get back to the "Bardic Covers" (game and movie themes done with Early instruments). Of course the direction I want to go there is a lot more authentic Early Music voicings, and there's a lot of theory to learn there as well. Plus my guitar--err, ukulele-- playing is really not up for the kind of parts I hear in my mind.
And stop with the instrument longings. More or less. I can justify the instrument above as my latest wish because my old uke just isn't up for what I'm demanding of it.
But as I've been thinking ahead towards the most likely next cover (the "Galaxy Map" backing track from Mass Effect) I can't help but notice there are multiple lines on different plucked or pitched percussion instruments. And wouldn't it be great to have a baby harp for this? Or...if for no other reason than harps are hard to play and building a lyre would be fun...
A "Sutton Hoo" style lyre.
And it worked. Felt an immediate improvement. Seems that the burbling I'd been getting was me hitting the edge of the slot. Once I was focused on the pitch center, I could also start playing with tone; I'm finding the shifts in mouth shape and tongue position that give a darker, softer tone, or a more focused, brighter tone.
Oh, yeah. And like with the violin, when you hit the pitch center dead on there's a sympathetic resonance you can hear and feel.
Above is a proof-of-concept draft: I recorded the horn part "wild"; over a portable mic, in the woodshop, without even a metronome. Once I put it in the working file I immediately realized the straight-up bass didn't work; what blended was the fake upright technique (thumb pluck and damping the strings near the bridge with the heel of the plucking hand).
And I had a bad moment when the piano didn't work at all. And I'd already tried organ and even guitar. But electric piano -- especially when I shifted from brushed snare to a brush hi-hat figure -- made a blend I liked.
So now I can work on solving the rest of the arrangement. And continue rehearsing the parts (the bass needs the most practice).
Picture from Ukulele Underground
The Hellboy cover is a very different direction. It is pushing instruments I don't know yet how to blend properly, or how to play properly. I want to get back to the "Bardic Covers" (game and movie themes done with Early instruments). Of course the direction I want to go there is a lot more authentic Early Music voicings, and there's a lot of theory to learn there as well. Plus my guitar--err, ukulele-- playing is really not up for the kind of parts I hear in my mind.
And stop with the instrument longings. More or less. I can justify the instrument above as my latest wish because my old uke just isn't up for what I'm demanding of it.
But as I've been thinking ahead towards the most likely next cover (the "Galaxy Map" backing track from Mass Effect) I can't help but notice there are multiple lines on different plucked or pitched percussion instruments. And wouldn't it be great to have a baby harp for this? Or...if for no other reason than harps are hard to play and building a lyre would be fun...
A "Sutton Hoo" style lyre.
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