The earliest music is lost in the mists of time; we can never recapture what it must have been like. But we do have some precious instrument survivors, none more remarkable than bone flutes from 40,000 years ago found in cave sites in southern Germany. These flutes have now been reconstructed as part of the European Music Archaeology Project and are here treated with real imagination, in conjunction with natural percussion noises, to create a tapestry of plausible sounds. The bending pitches and haunting, wavering timbres are used in original fantasies by Anna Friederike Potengowski and Georg Wieland Wagner, and even extend to a classic piece by John Cage. Worth exploring.
