Prehistoric Music

Prehistoric music, as a recorded category, comprises modern performances and reconstructions of the sound-making of pre-literate humanity: replicas of Palaeolithic bone and ivory flutes, bullroarers, rasps, lithophones and drums, played speculatively in caves and studios. No notation or continuous tradition survives, so every recording is an experiment in music archaeology, extrapolating from instruments such as the 40,000-year-old flutes of Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels. The results, part scholarship and part new composition, document the earliest recoverable layer of human musical behaviour.