In Search of the lost Sound

Text: Stefan Franzen, April 2026

On 5 September 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe launched from Cape Canaveral; on 25 August 2012, it left our solar system behind. Since then it has continued to venture ever deeper into interstellar space. It carries a very special cargo on board, the so-called »Golden Record«, a data disc containing drawings, photos and greetings from many peoples of Earth – and 27 works of music. In the event that the spacecraft ever falls into the hands (of whatever kind) of an alien civilisation, it would receive an acoustic calling card from humanity: featuring Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, as well as Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry, with sounds from the rainforest, Indonesian gamelan music and a Peruvian wedding song.

With an estimated lifespan of 500 million years, this golden record could be the perfect dream for all those concerned with preserving cultural treasures. Were it not for the extremely low probability that the preserved music will ever reach extra-terrestrial ears: Voyager 1 is currently a mere 25 billion kilometres away from us – a paltry one light-day’s journey; it would take the probe another 72,000 Earth years to reach the orbit of the nearest inhabitable planet. What is etched onto this record can safely be referred to as Lost Music.

Musical cultures that have been eroded by wars and waves of displacement, or suppressed by those in power. Research into historical sources and authentic stylistic approaches combined with modern influences. All of this can be experienced in the »Lost Music« series.

How does it even come to pass that music is »lost«? There is a whole catalogue of possible causes. First and foremost, quite simply, a great temporal distance. Exactly how the music of lost advanced civilisations might have sounded is a matter of speculation. But there is no shortage of efforts to at least form an idea of what has been lost. For example, music archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct the melodies of ancient Mesopotamian hymns based on information about musical practices found on Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets.

During excavations in Thebes, an almost perfectly preserved three-stringed lute belonging to Harmosis, a musician of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, was unearthed, and with the help of a wall painting, the American ensemble De Organographia has recreated the ancient Egyptian banquet music played on this lute. The British music ethnographer Michael Levy, in turn, a specialist in ancient stringed instruments, composes works in the spirit of ancient Greek music for the lyre and kithara – plucked instruments that were reconstructed based on vase paintings – using the tunings of ancient scales.

In a protected sphere such as the sacred realm, music transmitted not only in writing but also orally can survive over a long period of time, at least for as long as it is passed down without interruption. One example of the former is the liturgical music of the Armenian Church, for which a musical notation system was developed as early as the 7th Century. The hymns in Aramaic, on the other hand – the language of Jesus – were passed down orally until the 19th century; nevertheless, they have endured this long period and are still alive to this day in the Maronite Church, the Catholic community in Syria. The Lebanese artist Ghada Shbeir has played a major role in this; she is not only a singer but also a Professor of Oriental Studies and Liturgical Chant who researches Aramaic church chants. Together with the French gambist François Joubert-Caillet, she has developed a programme that brings together the early music of the West with that of the East in the here and now.

But what happens to music passed down solely through the spoken word when it is not safeguarded within such a protected realm and is instead exposed to external influences? The history of colonialism and missionary activity illustrates the principle of the power of invaders versus the powerlessness of small, dispersed ethnic groups. Take Brazil, for example: for 200 years, the Jesuits imposed the rites of the Catholic Church on the indigenous population; after the expulsion of the order’s members in the mid-18th century, the original culture had already been so weakened that it could no longer find a place in the hybrid forms that had since emerged from the music of West African slaves and the conquerors. In today’s Música Popular Brasileira, the indigenous influence is limited to trace elements, such as dance rhythms and the use of flutes.

Industrialisation and rural depopulation have also contributed to the disappearance of musical traditions. In Europe, this development was countered from the Enlightenment onward through the collection of folk songs. Johann Gottfried Herder was a central figure in this endeavour; then later, the Romantics intensified his efforts. With the invention of the phonograph at the end of the 19th century, the efforts of folklorists gained an entirely new means of documentation. The Hungarian composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály began their field research in 1904 and documented folk dances and songs of the Hungarian rural population on phonograph cylinders. In the English-speaking world, Percy Grainger and Cecil Sharp (who continued to rely on handwritten transcriptions) undertook comparable work.

However, the most comprehensive – and indeed global – work of the 20th century was likely carried out by the American Alan Lomax: starting in 1935, he spent decades using his tape recorder to collect songs and folk traditions across Europe, from Sicily to Ireland, as well as in Morocco, Russia and the Caribbean, making the folk treasures of the USA accessible to Bob Dylan and his contemporaries. Without him and his work for the Archive of American Folk Song, the history of pop music in the United States would almost certainly have unfolded differently. His guiding principle, and the driving force behind his work, was: »Cultural equity should join all the other principles of human dignity«. By »equity«, Lomax meant equal opportunity – the same conditions for the recognition and preservation of every culture – a counterpoint to the homogenisation and uniformity that globalisation would ultimately bring.

In the wake of the folk revival that began in the 1960s, young musicians, songwriters and folk singers across Europe rediscovered the traditions of their ancestors and used them to shape new forms of folk music. Before long, their attention extended beyond the borders of their own cultures. In 1994, the New York label Ellipsis Arts released a box set entitled »Voices of Forgotten Worlds«. Featuring music by the Inuit, the Maya, the Ainu of northern Japan, the Rashaida of Eritrea and the Ladakhi of Tibet, the label turned attention towards the roughly 500 million indigenous people worldwide whose ways of life, languages and cultural practices had been suppressed over the course of the 20th century.

In an effort to preserve humanity’s intangible cultural heritage, UNESCO adopted a convention 20 years ago that now encompasses 716 cultural expressions from 152 countries. In addition to artisanal and agricultural skills, it also counts the music of the world’s peoples among those traditions worthy of protection. Most recently, for instance, Tsapiky – the fast-paced dance music of southwestern Madagascar – and the Haitian Compas dance were added to the list. Such UNESCO listing recognition brings not only symbolic acknowledgment, but also financial support for these endangered traditions.

In the age of digital interconnectedness, efforts to preserve endangered music have been intensified and not only by institutions. Just how subtly and compellingly the younger generation of musicians from long-oppressed minorities – now also threatened by climate change – are renewing their cultural traditions was recently demonstrated by Inuit and Sami performers at the »Arctic Voices« Festival at the Elbphilharmonie.

The threat to musical diversity posed by wars, genocides and climate change remains immense. At the same time, the prospects for the survival of endangered sounds – whether traditional music of ethnological significance or danceable global pop – have perhaps never been more promising than they are today. Yet for these preserved sounds not to become museum artefacts, they must continue to evolve in contemporary ways. In a world shaped by migration, new possibilities emerge: musicians create works in exile, under radically altered living conditions, and through engagement with the influences of transformed daily lives – works that could never have arisen in quite the same way in their homelands.

Elaha Soroor is a particularly striking example of this. She has experienced one of the most lamentable causes of the disappearance of a musical culture: repression under fundamentalist rule. This is often directed specifically against women, who in many societies are the principal bearers of musical culture. Consider the Hazara minority of Afghanistan, for example, to which Soroor belongs: the country’s third-largest ethnic group, concentrated primarily in the central province of Bamiyan, once a crossroads of Buddhist, Greek and Persian cultures – and home to the Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Due to its roots in rural regions, Hazaragi folk music is especially vulnerable, standing little chance against commercial Western music formats, such as those adapted by the TV show »Afghan Star«. Passing on this culture has been made even more difficult by the fact that the Hazara belong to a Shiite, comparatively liberal branch of Islam and have long faced discrimination under Sunni rulers. Women singers, moreover, have always had to contend with patriarchal structures that brand musical performance as »dishonourable«.

This was true for Elaha Soroor as well, who grew up as a refugee between Afghanistan and Iran. After the Taliban were ousted from power, she courageously stepped into the public eye with her songs and openly criticized the enduring misogynistic structures. The hostility she faced was so intense that she shaved her head and dressed in men’s clothing. She has been living in London as a singer and composer since 2010. While the situation for the Hazara has reached a new bitter low following the return of the Taliban – who had already conquered the province of Bamiyan in 2021 before taking Kabul – Soroor, in exile, demonstrates how her minority’s music holds its own in today’s global pop world. With her band Kefaya, she has developed a new musical language that combines folk songs with at times rock-inspired sounds, while also incorporating traditional instruments and embracing influences from Arab and Indian musical traditions.

A similarly innovative fusion of musical traditions, aimed at reinforcing identity, is now unfolding in Ukraine as well. The Tatars are the largest indigenous population group in Crimea. From the 15th to the 18th century, they fostered cultural exchange between Turkey, Persia and Arabia. Since their incorporation into the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great, however, their history has been marked by persecution and exile; deported from the peninsula under Stalin, they were able to return only after Ukrainian independence in 1991 – and since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, they have once again come under pressure.

In order to preserve their musical heritage, multi-instrumentalist, song collector and composer Dzhemil Karikov and his daughter Nial Khalilova have joined forces in exile in Lviv with Ukrainian singer Natalia Rybka-Parkhomenko. As the ensemble Yuşan Zillya, the trio offers a striking example of how the distinct Islamic tradition of the Crimean Tatars has endured through cultural resilience and a willingness to engage in dialogue. For no one should rely on the hope that friendly aliens might one day discover our »Golden Record« and carry news of the Lost Music of a Lost Humanity out into the universe.

This article was published in the Elbphilharmonie Magazine (Issue 2/26)