The carnyx, the lur, and other ancient European horns

Abstract

Modern European brass instruments are the result of a long period of evolution. Relatively little is known about their ancestors, the lip-excited horns which were widely used in Europe several thousand years ago. Various attempts have been made to reconstruct playable versions of such instruments as the Scandinavian lur and the Celtic carnyx; although there is a considerable speculative element in all of these reconstructions, they offer the intriguing possibility of carrying out both musical and acoustical tests on these long-vanished instruments. In the last few years a project funded by the National Museums of Scotland has resulted in the reconstruction of two specimens of a carnyx, based on fragments found in Deskford, in Scotland, in the nineteenth century. Only the bell section, in the shape of a boar’s head, had survived, but from other pictorial evidence it is known that the instrument had a tube about 2 m long, and was held vertically. This paper reports on a series of acoustical tests which have been carried out on the two reconstructions, and compares the acoustical and musical properties of the carnyx with those of reconstructed lurs and other ancient horns. [Work supported by EPSRC(UK).]