Dirk Campbell - Music in Remote Antiquity
 DVD

Dirk was born in 1950 in Ismailia, Egypt and lived in Kenya till the age of 11. His family moved to England in 1962. Known as Mont Campbell, he formed the original rock band Egg in 1968 with Dave Stewart and Clive Brooks. In 1972 he went on to study composition at the Royal College of Music, gaining his ARCM diploma in 1974. He began his full-time career as a composer in 1989 with several commissions from Redwing Films, one of whose directors was David Anderson. He composed the score to David's BAFTA-winning animated film Dreamland Express in 1983. During the last 25 years, in addition to film, TV, commercials and stage composition, he has become a specialist on a wide range of folk wind instruments and has created two instrumental sound libraries. His CD, Music From a Walled Garden, was released in November 2009, a sequel to his 1996 release Music from a Round Tower. A lifelong fascination with remote antiquity led to his research into the survival of music from the distant past into present day folk tradition.

PRESENTATION: Music in Remote Antiquity


In the dry atmosphere of Egyptian tombs, paintings of musical performance and even some musical instruments have survived. We wonder what this music sounded like and assume either that we can never know, or that the style and melodies would have been roughly similar to those we are familiar with. Both assumptions are wrong. We can, and they weren't. We can have a good idea of what music was like thousands of years ago by plotting certain 'triangulation points': pitch systems, instrumental techniques, and instrumental designs that are similar or identical to those of ancient times, and that exist to this day in non-western traditions. Using these tools we can reconstruct the music of the ancient world with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Dirk's presentation is fully illustrated by slides, showing the earliest musical instruments to be discovered, and features extraordinary live demonstrations of several of them.

Pal Region 2