Gojko Barjamovic was awarded a Provostial grant

Gojko Barjamovic, Lecturer on Assyriology, was awarded grant from Harvard's Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities. This grant will support a concert and lecture held by two of the world’s leading Archaeomusicologists, who will play and discuss with a Harvard audience examples of the world’s oldest surviving music, recorded on 4000-year old clay tablets coming from ancient Mesopotamia.

It is a little-known fact that surviving examples of musical notation in Western Asia extend back in time as the 19th c. bce, or more than two millennia prior to the first recorded examples of Gregorian chant and the first well-documented works of Western musical tradition. However, the field of Archaeomusicology has seen remarkable progress in recent years, both in terms of a detailed understanding of the mathematical system of notation that was used to record music in ancient texts, and the archaeological-material component of reconstructing the ancient instruments from surviving physical examples and pictorial representations. This has led to a series of breakthroughs in the understanding of what the ancient music sounded like, and how instruments were built, tuned and played.