A Brief Account of the Development of the Field of Music Archaeology

The Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society was held at the University of California in Berkeley in 1977. A round table discussion group had been formed for the occasion on the topic “Music and Archaeology.” The participants in this group were Berkeley Professors Richard L. Crocker (Chair) and Anne D. Kilmer; other members of the group were Bathja Bayer (Jerusalem), Mantle Hood (Los Angeles), Charles Boiles (Mexico), Ellen Hickmann (Germany), Cajsa Lund (Sweden) and Liang Ming-Yueh (China). All the participants were eager to hear the views held by music historians on the values of the recovery of ancient music (including prehistoric music) and on the benefits of recreating ancient musical instruments. Those contributions, presented either in summary form or in full, were published in the reports from the Twelfth Congress.