Some thoughts from the mountain

 

When you are sitting at the top of the mountain outside the platform and you can’t see the technology that is producing this sound, it is as if you are transported directly back in time. Like the spirits of the long dead are awake and speaking. You are touching the very edge of past experience, the closest we will ever get to time travel, the human imagination. It makes you think of the real people who lived up here, dancing, singing, drinking, having fun and making love. Hearing the echos of the piercing whistles off the rocks, what that must have been like by firelight and starlight, the spirits, the ancestors awakening, skeletons dancing, life happening. It is incredible and brings tears of joy to my eye. I have found it, why I am doing what I do, for these rare moments of profound joy and understanding. I felt like Narcissus, never wanting to leave this spot, but to keep experiencing the living site, another time, another world.

Moro Intro Track 2

Moro Experiments 2

Moro Museo Larco Recordings

P.S. – Moro Introduction and Moro Experiments recordings are all musical instruments from San Jose de Moro of the Moche time period. Moro and Museo Larco recording is of instruments from the Museo Larco. The drum tracks are from Garageband.

March Madness!

I am so so sorry. My goal was to update this blog at least once a week, and I have fallen woefully short of that goal. March was a crazy month for me, which is why posting on the blog unfortunately, fell by the wayside. This is all going to change, right now! I promise that April will bring more updates, better updates, updates worth reading!

Except for this one.

March was a crazy month for many reasons. First, I was very sick for most of it. In the beginning of the month I fought off two bouts of stomach bugs and then in the middle of the month I came down with a super nasty cold that I am still experiencing the tail end of.

In addition to this, I finished my time at the Museo Larco on March 15^th, so the last two weeks I was there were quite mad, trying to finish as many pieces as I could before I had to leave. I still have about 100 pieces left to go, which I will finish when I come back to the museum in August. I gave a talk at the South American Explorer’s Club about my work, which went really well, and then the following week, (March 23^rd – 27^th) I was off to Trujillo and Huanchaco. This was both a great time, and an awkward time for me. I spent my first morning, straight off the bus in Trujillo talking to Dr. Santiago Uceda, who runs the Huaca de la Luna excavations about working with their collection. All in Spanish. Somehow I managed to get my point across and secured time to work with their collections in May. First I have to look through all their informes for the past 20 years and pick the pieces I want to work with. Sigh. And I have to do that and get the list to them before Easter. In two weeks. Eep. I spent about 5 days in Huanchaco, which was awesome, but I arrived to find that Prof. Brian Billman, who was graciously letting me stay and see what they were up to, had three days prior broken his shoulder falling down the stairs and was in the hospital. He is doing fine now, but needless to say, my coming could not have come at a worse time, so I felt a bit useless being there, though I had lots of good food and awesome company (thanks guys!). An unintended consequence of this was that Jennifer asked me to give the undergraduates a talk about what I am doing, which I gladly accepted and which went really well. Giving these talks has been a fantastic experience, because it is letting me collect my thoughts periodically, get feedback from others, and get better at explaining my work to others.

So now I am back working at Catolica on the San Jose de Moro collections, which is great, but incredibly frustrating.  Mostly because it is nearly impossible to record in the space I have been given, because students are idiots and sit outside the lab on the grass playing terrible guitar. That combined with the constant airplane noise from the nearby airport gives me very limited time each day to record. It involves a lot of waiting around and straining my ears for pockets of quiet. Oh well, it is what it is. I promise to give a proper academic update next time. Until then, here are some photos:

 

Rainbow halo around the sun, taken from the courtyard at the Museo Larco.

Huanchaco Beach! Complete with boats!

Prof. Billman’s Dig House, complete with rad old car (that he just bought!)

Puppy! How can you not love that face!

Huaca El Brujo: I finally visited while I was in Huanchaco.

Am I Useful?

I originally wanted this section of the blog to just be fieldwork musings. It was to be entitled “A day in the life” and consist mostly of my ramblings about the trials, tribulations and rewards of doing archaeological fieldwork. I quickly realized that I wanted these posts to be much more than this. I wanted this website to be a place to for people to come and learn more about my project, and to potentially receive feedback about my work. I wanted it to be a place where interested people could learn more about what the research I was doing than what my inept explanations could provide.

Conversations with new people tend to go like this:

Person: what are you working on?

Me: Music archaeology.

Person: What is that?

Me: It’s working with ancient musical instruments, music iconography and soundscapes

Person: oh. (changes subject)

At some point I need to create a succinct and interesting blurb about my research that I can quip at parties, but I am still not sure what even to designate myself, let alone a few sentence explanation of what I do. Contenders for a job title so far: archaeomusicologist; music archaeologist; acoustic archaeologist. All sound a bit lame and do not describe exactly what I do, so I will continue the search.

Additionally, I have a room in the Larco Museum in which I make audio recordings. Eventually this room will be an additional exhibition area for the museums warehouse collection, but at the moment it remains unfinished.

My recording studio

The room has no power, no lights and no air-conditioning, but it is quiet. A glass door separates this room from the rest of the warehouse exhibition space that people can freely access. This room and the glass door are not soundproof either, so as I am making recordings, in particular of the louder instruments such as trumpets and pututos, people walking around the museum, especially the warehouse section, can hear me. This produces a fishbowl effect of bewildered tourists peering through the glass at me, wondering what I am doing. I am hoping to post a sign soon, with this web address on it, so if someone is truly interested in what they are hearing, they can visit and contact me.

Anyway, I was chatting with Michelle H. on Skype last night about a lot of my fears, concerns and worries about this project.  I just feel so alone and on my own all of the time, and that is both exciting and very scary. I am trying to do something completely unique, but the drawback of this is that I have very little precedent to draw upon when devising such important aspects of this project, such as methods. Basically I am making everything up as I go along, finding what works, what doesn’t work, and making huge amounts of notes about what I am doing, so I can at least look back on what I did and say “what the *bleep* was I doing?” in a year or two. I am collecting all the data aspects I can possible think of, but this list expands almost daily, which means certain sets of data will be more complete than others. This provides a constant string of worries: am I doing enough, am I spending my time wisely enough, am I focusing on the right aspects, am I collecting the right data, am I truly exploring the range of sounds these instruments can produce? If one works with the philosophy that any new knowledge is important knowledge, then any data I produce remains important, because it is all new observations. If one works with the philosophy that new knowledge remains worthless unless it is of interest or relevance to others, then I am not sure if what I do is worthwhile at all. I am having the most fun I have ever had doing archaeology working on this project. I spend my afternoons making music with 2000 year old instruments, literally re-awakening the past, making sounds no one has heard for 2,000 years and it is absolutely amazing. But the question remains, how can I translate this into something insightful and impactful to the wider archaeological community and the world of knowledge production in general?

*sings* and I would find 1000 objects..

When I began this project in earnest, sometime in the beginning of November, 2010, my first task was to comb through the Museo Larco archives and make a list of all the artifacts that both pertained to music (ie. musical iconography) or were actually musical instruments. In my initial estimates, I thought I would find about 400 total examples. This was based on a rudimentary search of ‘music’ in the database, which returned about 400 entries.

After weeks of searching through photos and descriptions, the final list of all music-related totaled 1,003 pieces, with about half being musical iconography and half being musical instruments.

At a maximum of ten pieces a day, this would take me at least 100 days, time that I didn’t have, nor did the museum have to grant me. So I settled on viewing about 300 objects, all musical instruments, since the musical iconography database I wished to create did not require measurements or recordings the way the musical instruments did. Since February 2nd, 2011 I have been working at the Museo Larco on my final list of 358 intact musical instruments, which will hopefully be completed this year.

To that end, I already have around 100 recordings, not all of which I can post here, though each week I will try and post 3-5 of the best. Enjoy!

ML000568 – Botella Silbadora

ML016164 – Pututo

ML016182 – Trompeta

Bienvenidos! Welcome!

Welcome to the Moche Music Project. This is very much a work in progress, so please visit the ABOUT tab for information on the project. Thank you! Gracias!