What function does the Web serve in your efforts?
The web was an extremely important ingredient. The interface to the computing Grid infrastructure is web-based and we can allow researchers and students to have access to the full power of the reconstruction engine just using a web browser, without having to install software or maintain hardware. We are also relying on the web to immediately publish the outcomes of our research, distribute the results the results so that they can be made available to a large community of users immediately using dedicated R&E networking.
Your site talks about how the project started in 2009. What has the orchestra done in that intervening time?
In two years and a half, we moved from just one instrument (the epigonion) to a small ensemble of four, two Greek instruments and two Latin American ones (epigonion, barbiton, tambór and quena de hueso).
Last year, the project worked together with the Museo de Arte Precolombino (Santiago, Chile) on the reconstruction of two ancient musical instruments (quena de hueso and tambór) from Pre-Colombian Latin America . The quena de hueso (literelly bone flute) was a traditional flute of the Andes belonging to the Nasca culture (southern Peru). The tambór (drum) was a percussion belonging to the Gentilar culture (northern Chile) and it is more ancient that the quena, we can date it between 1200 and 1470 b.C.
The two reconstructed instruments [PDF] were used for the first time in public on May 14th 2010, during the official launch of ALICE2 (Latin America Interconnected with Europe) and the second generation of the RedCLARA network. At the end of the ceremony, hold together with the EU-LAC Ministerial Meeting, under the Spanish Presidency of the European Union in Madrid, the instruments played in a piece from the first musical work written in Latin America, “The Purple of the Rose”, an opera in one-act composed by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco to a libretto by Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1701).
Finally, we started organizing concerts, events and exhibitions. These included a performance in Stockholm in December of 2009, where advanced networking enabled a distributed performance with musicians in Stockholm and dancers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and one at the Casa Del Suono in Parma in, 2010, where a Plexiglas controller was built to play digital sounds with a modern interface.
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