After a lot of Louvre and Pompeii on this site, here’s a move towards the Archaic and Classical period: the Dorian aulos I have recontructed from textual evidence in my Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History, playing the intervals recorded by Aristoxenus for the traditional Libation tune ascribed to Olympus, which seems to have remained in ritual use for many centuries.
I’ve made new reeds for it, returning to the hard cane I had started work on aulos reeds almost twenty years ago. And yes, I’ve toasted them a bit.
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Hi Stefan,
It sounds great and very interesting; I’m really looking forward to see that pair of auloi, on any occasion. Although from other sources I know what it is about (to a certain extent), I’m about to start reading your book, so I’ll soon come upon this subject, which I find fascinating.
By the way, may I ask what you mean by ‘hard reeds’?
Best wishes!
The box of oboe cane I had ordered for my first aulos experiments turned out (in hindsight, as I did not know anything else then) to be of quite hard material. My first reeds were very short, required a lot of pressure and gave an almost flutelike sound.
It’s very difficult to guess what the ancients’ preferred cane woud have been like – ‘sterile plants’ growing within a particular pattern of inundation in a particular lake that’s no longer around…