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Forgotten Bach Instrument Recreated

Submitted by Dave Mosher

posted: 02 June 2009 09:11 am ET


Three hundred years after its last sounding, a long-lost instrument called the lituus -- one of Johann Sebastian Bach's go-to horns -- is back from the dead.

According to the BBC's report, no one alive today has ever heard, seen or read descriptions of the real deal. Experts recently pegged it, however, as a long, trumpet-like instrument similar to that used by Romans and medieval people.

To reproduce it, historians chipped in accounts of similar instruments, Bach-fanatic musicians gave their best guesses as to what it might have sounded like, and University of Edinburgh engineers plugged the data into modern brass instrument-improving software.

The result: An 8.5-foot wooden tube that professional musicians describe as giving a "haunting" quality to music.

Not surprising when you consider a grave-side funeral song by Bach, called O Jesu Christ, mein's Lebens Licht ("Oh Jesus Christ, my life's light"), is the last known composition the lituus was written into.

Hear it here.

View Web Link Read full story at BBC News

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