Bringing Ancient Sounds Back to Life, by Alex Marshall

LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”

With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.

Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.

He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.

 The classical record label Delphian is also releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.

John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iiron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”

“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”

The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic era to around A.D. 1,000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).

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