The Works：Egyptian mummies from British Museum & in the studio: handpan & shakuhachi

From Boris Karloff as the ancient Egyptian prince Imhotep, to Hammer’s Christopher Lee, to the more recent CGI blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, Egyptian mummies have certainly long fascinated filmmakers. And it’s not just the movies. The popularity of the British Museum’s Ancient Egypt collection shows that many of us are fascinated by the ancient civilization’s approach to death and the afterlife. Around 150 Egyptian antiquities were among the 71,000 objects collected by Sir Hans Sloane that the museum was set up in 1753 to preserve. From those humble beginnings the antiquities collection has become the largest outside Egypt itself, popular not only for what it tells us about the ancient Egyptian way of death, but also what it tells us about their way of life.
It’s quite likely that, apart from the voice, man’s earliest experience of music was banging one object against another and seeing what noise it made. Discovering that other objects made interesting noises when you blew into them probably came not much long after. Primitive bone flutes at least 35,000 years old have been found. From those beginnings have evolved a whole range of sophisticated percussion and wind instruments, including the Japanese shakuhachi and the more recently developed handpan, an evolution of Caribbean steelpan instruments. Joining us in the studio with Billy from our sister programme 藝坊星期天 are Seeman Ho and Jasper Ng to talk to us about their attempt to merge the music of those instruments with the music of language.