The summer of 2021 I was in Finnmark, the place of my birth and the coldest and Northernmost county of Norway. Even in the summer, temperatures rarery exceed 15 centigrades, and the wind, ever blowing, has flattened the outermost landscape of Magerøya to a wide tundra fit for only two larger creatures, man and reindeer.
In fact, the reindeer leads a nomadic lifestyle, only traveling north to the island to graze and fatten for the winter. With some 5000 animals, it is a statistical inevitability that not all of them make it home. The craggy landscape, dotted with scree is a hostile environment to a slender deer, and it is not uncommon to happen upon a skeleton of a deer while hiking in the sloping mountains.
It was on one of these trecks that I discovered a deer that an idea came to me. These animals were used to make anything by the sami, and still are by some tribes in siberia. Why not try to make a flute?
I picked out the two most likely members I could find, the upper leg bones.
The unfinished flute
The bone had hardened during the winter, and was bleached by the midnight sun.
The deer had most likely starved to death, either after falling ill in the summer, breaking a leg, or perhaps it was stranded during the winter. Either way, the bones were hardened and whitened after being exposed to the elements for so long.
I remembered vaguely having seen some design before of stone age flutes, and managed to find an image of the Divje Babe flute, from Slovenia.
Divje Babe flute
This flute is about 43’000 years old.
This flute is so old, even the nature of the humanity of those who made it is in question. Not to get sidetracked, let us explore quickly the design of this flute. The holes are closely spaced, but large. This may be due to erosion, but I don’t think so, as the notch at the top is not so much larger than what one would expect from a functioning instrument.
The flute is clearly end blown - a technique abandoned completely in western music, but preserved in several asian flutes, most well known in the west is the Shakuhatchu native to Japan.
Now, let us go on to the reconstruction I made.
This is the flute I was able to make, and it has some very interesting features! From a technical standpoint the flute has a range of about an octave, starting in f#. Each hole position gives a clear tune, that can be altered through position to give a pitch range of about a semitone. With different combinations, overblowing, and even putting a finger into the bottom of the tube, one is able to stretch the range to the full octave.
Due to this flexibility, producing a vibrato is very simple - one only shakes the flute while playing. Other than that, the sound is quite expressive, and many nuances of timbre can be coaxed in every pitch. This is not a primitive instrument! It can produce sounds exceeding in quality that of many recorders, though it requires a lot of training just to produce a single note.
The decoration is done with simple bone carving with a knife, and the notches are stained with ink. I went for a simple design because bone carving is a hard skill, and I’d rather have beautifully done simple carvings than ugly intricate ones.
Now all that remains is writing some music, and then performing it! A rather alien concept to a flute 43’000 years in the making.