Sound Tracks: A Musical Detective Story

"This is a joyful read. It’s by a leading musical archeologist, which might not be a discipline you even knew existed. Lawson doesn’t call it ‘a history of sound in X objects’ but that might be a helpful way of thinking about it. It has lots of wonderfully short and readable chapters, each one about an archeological find of some sort of musical instrument, that help us understand the sounds of the past. The book starts in the present and works backwards. Like an archeological dig, you’re unearthing layer after layer. He goes back to the very origins of humanity and looks at our very ancient ancestors, their sense of rhythm and sound, and how we might detect that through archaeology. Graeme Lawson not only knows an awful lot about archeology. He also knows how to take a squashed bit of metal, recognize that this was a flute from the Middle Ages, reconstruct it, build a replica—and then figure out how to play it so you can hear the sound it actually made. It’s just extraordinary. You can hear the past. The book is also very good at giving a sense of what archeology does and how archeologists approach things. It points out, for example, that archeology isn’t generally very good at attaching the names of people to things. Archaeologists are in general not able to say ‘this squashed bit of flute belonged to so and so.’ There are some cases where you can do that—maybe sometimes they have a little name carved on them. But archaeology is not really about people with names. It’s about things. What archeologists do is look at the stuff that people had, and from these material traces they try to recover something of what it was like to be alive in the past. This may not be a surprise to archeologists, but Lawson does a fine job of conveying the texture and practice of archaeology to a broader public. For example, Lawson looks at the detritus left in a medieval workshop in Oxford, where they made and repaired musical instruments. It was right in the center of Oxford, and Lawson talks us through the piles of stuff they had, to explain what the urban scene was like for somebody who wanted to buy a musical instrument in medieval Oxford. Yes, the winner is the winner, but we really want to stress the importance of the whole shortlist as a representation of what it is that the humanities and social sciences bring to the world. That’s what the shortlist always tries to do, and I hope we’ve accomplished it. It’s a great pleasure. The winner of the 2025 British Academy Book Prize will be announced on the 22nd of October."