Age of Brass

[tamaranth]

Listening to Radio 3 this morning, I was intrigued by the following snippet re Nielsen's Helios Overture (which I only caught half of, but have just ordered from Amazon):
[paraphrase] "... featuring the lur, the oldest brass instrument in the world: lurs from the Bronze Age have been found in Danish peat bogs ..."

So they had brass in the Bronze Age then?

Actually I had no idea what a lur was (and could not even recall the actual name, just that it started with 'lu-'): but that is what teh interweb is for.

It is a funny-looking beast. Found all over Scandinavia. And it sounds quite primeval. .. bringing this story to mind.

am not werking very hard but then our shy and elusive deadline has just retreated a little further from us, and is eyeing us coyly from the end of the first week in July.

Comments

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

Cool! My son's a budding brass player. I'll show him this later.

Love the idea that the shape is based on mammoth tusks.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Amd of course it used to be on the packaging for Lurpak butter, which takes its name from it.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I did not know that.

Thank you, that's my trivia bit of the day!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Heh, flutes are woodwind instruments in spite of the fact they are usually not made of wood (or wind) :-)

Not all brass instruments are made of brass. Many French horns, for example, are made of nickel silver, an alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel (it's silver in name and color only), and some are made of nickel bronze, an alloy of copper, tin, and nickel. (Brass itself is an alloy of copper and zinc.) Many brass instruments are silver-plated (sterling silver on brass), and some are gold-plated.

http://www.cso.org/main.taf?p=1,1,4,3

So even now not all brass instruments are brass :-)

lurs from the Bronze Age have been found in Danish peat bogs
So are they saying that where there's muck there's brass? (!)

[del-c.livejournal.com]

It's possible to make a pedantic distinction between bronze and brass as alloys, but historically the actual practice of naming them has been sloppy and inconsistent. We materials scientists say brass (almost always) is an alloy of copper with zinc, and bronze is (usually) an alloy of copper with tin, but that's only because the language supplies us with a handy number of words for it. If only the huge variety of "steels" were as well-distinguished in common speech!

[asynje.livejournal.com]

And you have been in the vicinity of a statue (http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurbl%C3%A6serne) showing off the lur.

According to the local tales they blow their lurer, when a virgin passes.

Hasn't happened yet.