Sounds of the Neanderthals
As part of the Archaeology Festival - Cardiff 2009, visit National Museum Cardiff for a special lecture followed by a performance of music.
Sounds of the Neanderthals, 8 February 2009 from 6pm - 8pm with Professor Steven Mithen, a foremost expert in the study of past human minds, looks at the role that music, especially singing, may have played in the lives of the Neanderthals.
The lecture ends with a premier performance of specially commissioned music by composer and sound artist, Simon Thorne, inspired by Neanderthal fossil remains on display in the Origins exhibition.
Simon Thorne is one of Wales’ leading composers, an inspiring maverick whose work has a rare, visionary beauty. Now he is joined by four extraordinary vocalists, each one a virtuoso master in the styles and techniques of the songs of the world.
Together they create a ceremony for the earth as if it were new born to our ears. Accompanied by haunting video projection, they take us into the cave of our consciousness to illuminate the first spark of communication.
This promises to be a truly extraordinary evening, a search for origins. Not in any historical sense, but in the sense of answering the question, why did we ever come to make music in the first place? Take a journey along the songlines of our ancestral past, to a moment where language and song are joined in the same instinctive breath.
A collaboration with Rhombus Arts.
Supported by the G.C. Gibson Charitable Settlement.
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