Stef Connor used her classical training in music composition and vocal performance (she received her PhD from the Music Department at the University of York), and her passion for ancient Mesopotamian language, to assemble a group of musicians who named themselves The Lyre Ensemble. The trio consisted of Connor, Mark Harmer as the trio's producer, and Andy Lowings, a harpist and creator of the "Gold Lyre of Ur Project." Stef was driven by the belief that
"Music is a powerful tool to forge empathetic connections between people in the modern world and voices from the deep past."
Andy Lowings, also a brilliant talent with the ancient lyre, composed the songs using his own meticulously-reconstructed 4,500-year old Mesopotamian instruments.
Stef wore a recreated Babylonian gold and lapis lazuli choker
The first scholar to put ancient words to music was Anne Draffkorn, whose work on the Hurrian songs tablet and the Hymn to Nikkal was a landmark piece of music history. Stef drew inspiration from the Hurrian tablet and the process by which thousands of years were traversed through the medium of song.
One side of the Hurrian tablet, and Anne Draffkorn's musical transcription
Stef took stanzas of poetry from ancient sagas like the Epic of Gilgamesh and worked with Andy to give voice to a dead language that has been silent for over four and a half millennia. Because there are no recordings of how Sumerian or Babylonian actually sound spoken aloud, she had to study anthrolinguistic research for clues about stress, inflection, tone.
The result is something that sounds at once haunting and deeply profound, made even more so by the knowledge that the Sumerian empire was at one time as vast and powerful as ourselves yet faded to dust along with their language and song a whole 2,000 years before the Rome even saw Christianity. It is a sound of a memory coming to life briefly before dwindling to the sleep and silence of the long ages again. It is the sound of what we will be to another distant people someday: dusty and ancient, beautiful and strange.