The sounds of music enjoyed by the Irish 3,000 years ago was played for an audience in Sligo who last night enjoyed a Science Week lecture entitled Sounds Ancient.
The show focused on what Simon O'Dwyer of Prehistoric Music Ireland described as the country's extraordinarily rich "music archaeology".
Ireland holds about 40 per cent of all the ancient metal musical instruments known in the world, he explained at the lecture organised by Sligo Institute of Technology.
The oldest in the national collection, a set of panpipes recovered three years ago near Greystones, Co Wicklow, dates back some 4,150 years, he said.
There are 104 Bronze Age horns, including the 9ft long Ardbrin trumpet, which was discovered in Co Down and dates back 2,100 years.
Mr O'Dwyer had no indication why so many ancient instruments had been recovered here. "I assume it means Ireland has always been very musical," he suggested.
The design of the bronze horns was extraordinary, he said. "It was incredibly complex and incredibly advanced. It is just miraculous."
These were cast items, but the later Iron Age instruments were produced from sheet metal. Most of the wooden instruments were made from a single piece of wood that was split, carved to produced sound-producing hollows, and then glued and fixed with metal bands. The panpipes, however, were bored out rather than split. "We don't know how that was done," Mr O'Dwyer said.
