Una storia intessuta.

A woven story. When I was about 12 years old, the Gravity Games came to our local city. One of the events that I became obsessed with was the street luge. In this death-defying race, participants lie down on a skateboard-like contraption, and use gravity to hurtle themselves down a steep hill towards a finish line, lined with bales of hay to cushion their eventual impact.

I had a skateboard.

The neighborhood had a few steep hills.

I strapped my helmet on.

There were no bales of hay.

After a few wobbly descents, I began problem solving, thinking of ways to modify the skateboard and make things go faster. In the back of the garage I found an old cardboard box with what I assumed was scrap wood. I proceeded to unscrew the axels and wheels from my skateboard, and began sawing and nailing pieces of wood together, attaching the skateboard wheels to the bottom. I felt quite triumphant, and immediately went to show my mother the product of my imaginative, mechanical ambitions.

My mother's face grew pale, her jaw dropped, I was summarily marched into the car, and silently driven to the local church to talk with the priest. What I had thought was just a dusty stack of wood scraps, turned out to be my great-grandmother's antique loom, which she had used to make tapestries and fabric for clothing, passed down from mother to daughter for several generations. I had destroyed the family's literal heirloom. To this day I still get a pit in my stomach, a pang of anxiety in my chest, and in this moment of writing, tears have welled up in my eyes. The object can never be replaced, the touch of generations of hands, the care and craft, the memories wrapt in its history, the time and space it had traveled across decades and centuries and countries--all lost.

While studying the inscriptions and archaeology of the Samnites, I came across a five-letter Greek inscription in Katherine McDonald’s book Italy Before Rome. This is the oldest known Greek inscription in the Mediterranean and was found at Gabii, an archaeological site about 11 miles outside of Rome. It dates to around 775 BCE. The inscription was scratched onto the surface of a ceramic funerary urn containing a woman’s cremated remains, and reads: ΕΥΛΙΝ.

[Caption: Close-up of the EULIN inscription. Photo credit: from the photographic archive of the Museo Nazionale Romano - Terme di Diocleziano. See also, Giovanni Boffa, p. 162.]

The word eulin, most likely an abbreviation of eulinos, translates to “good at spinning.” Both prefix eu-, meaning “good” (i.e. euphoric, euphonium, etc.), and its ending lin(os), sit at the intersection of etymology, anthropology, linguistic archaeology, and mythology. Λῖνος (linos) is related to the Greek word for flax λινάρι (linari), the plant from whose fibers textiles were made, and where we get the English word linen.

[Caption: Left: Terracotta onos or epinetron (knee protector) used in the process of carding wool, in preparation for spinning thread, MET Museum, New York City. Center: Terracotta epinetron, fragment depicting an Amazon warrior playing a salpinx (ancient Greek trumpet) and Greek solfege syllables (the notes the trumpet may have played). Right: Terracotta epinetron from the Nation Museum in Athens, depicting warriors, with Greek solfege syllables and modern notation of the trumpet call.]

It may also be the word referring to the strings (spun from flax fibers) used on ancient lyres. The Greek god Linos (Λινος) was known as the inventor of rhythm, melody, and the harp (or lyre), and the personification of dirge, lamentation, and threnody (there is a Classical Greek song genre called linos). One story of Linos’ death recounts that as he was attempting to teach Heracles (Hercules) how to play the lyre, he grew frustrated with Heracles’ poor ability, and proceeded to beat him. In retaliation, Heracles struck Linos with the lyre he was playing, killing him.

[Caption: Top left and center: From the Nuovo Museo Sannitico Provinciale in Campobasso, Molise. A Samnite painted ceramic vessel depicting someone holding a lyre-like instrument, possibly kithara or phorminx. Top right and bottom row: my own phorminx, work-in-progress. I am building this instrument using only hand tools, with the intention of tuning the strings to the same pseudo-Pythagorean scales that the Samnites would have used, in order to perform my instrumental and vocal compositions (in Oscan).]

The religious and cultural traditions of the Samnites overlapped with those of the ancient Greeks, including venerating Heracles (Herklei in Oscan) and playing the lyre.

[Caption: Left: A Samnite statuette of a musician playing an aulos, or double flute. Right: Samnite votive statues of HERKLEI (Heracles/Hercules). Samnite Museum, Campobasso.]

Wool, flax, spinning, and linen also held significance for both cultures: the acts of spinning and weaving were believed to hold magical powers, as connected to the Fates (the Moirae, depicted spinning thread) and the deities of childbirth and fertility. Spinning was done during childbirth, providing clothing for the new child as well as releasing magic and imparting it into the material. Eileithyia, Greek goddess of childbirth, was given the title εὕλινος (“good at spinning”).

[Caption: Top row, left to right: an ancient Samnite pair of scissors, perhaps for shearing sheep; spindle whorls for spinning thread, bone and bronze needles, bone discs, and ceramic loom weights; holding a Samnite ceramic loom weight. Bottom row, left to right: close-up of spindle whorls, loom weights, and needles; some small ceramic vessels and miniature replica of a warp-weighted loom. Some of these objects date back to the 8th century BCE. All from the Samnite Museum in Campobasso.]

The Greeks celebrated the festival of Eiresione, wherein singers would parade around a village, placing olive branches covered in wool on doorsteps. Linen was used for Greek armour, called λινοθώρηξ (linothorax). The Samnites also venerated linen: their elite soldiers, called the Linen Legion, were sworn into their duties with the use of a sacred linen book. This rite took place inside a sacred space covered entirely in linen.

[Caption: Left and center: An ancient Greek oil flask (lekythos) depicting the process of making textiles, including a warp-weighted loom (from the MET Museum, New York City). Right: A medieval depiction of Pythagoras using weights to apply precise tension on strings, producing specific pitches of a musical scale.]

In thinking about who this Eulin may have been (was that her name, or just an epithet given to her by a loved-one upon her burial?), and how important textiles and clothing were to individuals, families, communities, and societies, how important the keepers of these techniques and traditions were, I was inspired to compose a piece of music.

[Caption: The 'loom room' at the Samnite Museum, Campobasso.]

The piece utilizes pseudo-serialist techniques to translate the five letters of eulin into a 5x5 tone matrix as the basis for the main melody. Each note in the Mixolydian scale is assigned a number 1-7, and each letter of the Greek alphabet is assigned a number. Then, each letter of the inscription can be transcribed into a note of the scale. I have dubbed this technique grammatonic transcription; γρᾰ́μμᾰ (grắmmă) meaning 'letter' or 'that which is written/drawn' and τόνος (tónos) meaning 'tension' (as in a cord or rope) or 'note/tone' produced by plucking a string under tension.

[Caption: Grammatonic transcription of the EULIN inscription, with resulting 5x5 tone row, and photo/drawing of the ceramic vessel and inscription.]

Rhythmic structures are used to represent the acts of spinning and weaving, subdividing the number 12 in various ways, and exploring the interactions of 2 and 3, and 3-4-5, in the way a pattern may be woven on a loom. These numerical musical choices are also a nod to the harmonic/geometric theories attributed to Pythagoras and his follower Aristoxenus, two Greeks living in Southern Italy contemporaneously with the Samnites. The Samnite philosopher Herennius Pontius, father of a Samnite general (perhaps a member of the linen legion), was in contact with both Archytas (who also wrote on Pythagorean music theory) and Plato, and was described by ancient Roman historians as a Pythagorean himself.

[Caption: Excerpt from EULIN, arranged for string quartet. After the viola introduces the melody earlier on, it is shared by 'cello and violin I (starting pickup to measure 45, playing two octaves apart). Violin II and viola provide rhythmical/harmonic backdrop to the melody, utilizing different permutations of Pythagorean 3-4-5 emphases.]

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/e140d9_6378578f99274a6bab4e9fe3dba7b564/360p/mp4/file.mp4

[Caption: Computer playback (not acoustic instruments) excerpt from ΕΥΛΙΝ arranged for string quartet, pickup to measure 30 until about measure 52.]

*Bibliographical note: Boffa, Giovanni. Il Vaso Ben Levigato: una proposta di lettura per l'iscrizione più antica dalla necropoli di osteria dell'osa. Estratto da PAROLA DEL PASSATO, rivista di studi antichi. Olschki Editore, Firenze. 2015.

Thank you for reading and listening. Stay tuned for more.