Seven years ago, I built a small lyre based on a 1200 BCE artifact that had been excavated in the ruins of the ancient city of Har Megiddo (aka “Armageddon”) in northern Israel. Once the instrument was completed, I posted a video of it to RU-vid and within a couple of weeks I received a request from THE MUSEUM OF MAKING MUSIC in Carlsbad, California, to allow them to have the instrument on temporary loan for a display they were planning.
I packed up the lyre, sent it to the museum, and more or less forgot about it. A few weeks ago, the lyre was returned to me by the museum. It was just like receiving a brand new instrument, and I decided to do something new with it.
The original artifact on which the lyre was based is roughly contemporary with King David, and it is safe to assume that David played a lyre (which the Old Testament calls a “kinnor” in Hebrew) that was similar to the Canaanite “lyre of Megiddo”. According to tradition, of the 150 psalms in the Old Testament BOOK OF PSALMS, 73 are said to have been written by David himself. Of these, Psalm 23 is one of the most loved.
No one has any idea what the psalms might have sounded like sung by David but we do know he was a singer and an instrumentalist. No music has survived, and the texts were not written down until several hundred years after David’s death. I can make no claims to authenticity in this rendition, since we do not even know how David tuned his lyre. For this video, I have tuned to an F minor harmonic scale, and I sang in a gentle, lyric, style, which seems appropriate for the content. All I can say for sure is that it would have been possible for David to play this on his 10-string “kinnor”.
The MUSEUM OF MAKING MUSIC has been recently renovated and for anyone interested in music who happens to be in the Carlsbad, California, area it is well worth a visit.
When I built the lyre in the video above, I put together a webpage (URL below) showing how it was created after the original artifact.
17 сен 2021
