The Urnossean Myth, or the Anthropological Fabulation According to André Hamel
In the 20th century, a series of archeological findings led to artefacts ostensibly originating among the Urnossean people, tribes of shepherds that lived in the 3rd millenium before Christ. During the 1970s, the deciphering of ancient Harappan texts served to confirm this hypothesis while informing us of the culture at large. This deciphering allowed us to postulate that the inscriptions on the artefacts could be musical in nature. Archeologists and anthropologists speculated at length about the role music may have played for these matriarchal tribes of Antiquity. They concluded that music must have been central to a rite used in the periodical staging of this people’s creation myth. In 2004 and 2011, taking this hypothesis as starting point, composer André Hamel, the La Nef collective and science popularizers Bernard Arcand and Michel Rochon gave a performance of the rite, reconstituting it for Montreal’s audiences. There’s only one hitch in this account: never, to this day, has the Harappan language been deciphered...