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Make an ancient Egyptian doublepipe with Barnaby Brown

3-day workshop, 22–24 November 2025, 9am – 5pm. Jointly organised by Lotos Lab, the Austrian Archaeological Institute, and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology.

An activity designed for scholars of ancient music, university students, musicians, educational settings of all kinds, and anyone interested in ancient cultures. Create a working doublepipe using oat straw and Common reed respecting New Kingdom originals in Berlin, Turin, and Paris. Become part of a community dedicated to the interpretation of ancient evidence.

Lotos Lab combines real-world expertise with cutting-edge scholarship. Recent workshops include making Ur doublepipes in Würzburg, Classical Greek auloi in Oxford, and Egyptian pipes in Matera at the 1st ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ Research Retreat.

This workshop fills the days between the ISGMA conference (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 17–21 November) and the symposium Binary harmony in traditional music and beyond (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, 25–28 November 2025), at which Barnaby Brown and Marco Sciascia will be presenting papers and performing.

Register here

Schedule

Saturday 22 November, 9:30 – 17:00

Venue: Institut für Volksmusikforschung, Seminarraum AW U0213, Ungargasse 14/2. Stock, 1030 Wien

9:30 – 13:00  Make two ‘yokes’ of reeds respecting Theophrastus Hist. Pl. 4.11 (see Journal of Music Archaeology 2):

  • Select a pair of Phragmites australis stems for the drones of your Egyptian doublepipe, choosing between New Kingdom originals in the  Berlin Äegyptisches Museum, Musée du Louvre, and Museo Egizio Torino. If you are flying, consider what will fit in your bag: finished case lengths are 55cm for a ‘Maket’ doublepipe (Berlin), 63.5cm for a ‘Mut’ doublepipe (Louvre), and 69.5cm for the longest ‘Torino’ pipes.
  • Select two oat straws that fit well in your drones. Mark waists on each straw, cut lengths of waxed thread, soak in hot water, and practise tying clove hitches (use the ‘over, over, under’ method in this video: slow demo, fast demo).
  • Prepare four knots, remove one straw using a knitting needle so you don’t burn your fingers, tie two waists tight to the needle, remove the needle. Repeat with your other straw.
  • Soak straws again with freshly boiled water. When pliant, squeeze the blades from the edges (fold the corners first, without applying pressure at the centre). Position a cork-strip clamp so the bulbs are identical in size.
  • Assemble two pairs of reed caps that will ‘yoke’ your reeds together, educating and protecting them when you are not playing.

Shared lunch in the MDV cafeteria

14:00 – 17:00  Make the body of your doublepipe.

  • Clean the bore, mark the fingerholes, and get two other people to verify that your marks are in the right place.
  • Following safety instructions rigorously, heat hole-making tools of the correct diameter in the flame of a culinary blow torch and burn your fingerholes.
  • Assemble a PVC pipe case (32 mm diameter) with ventilated caps so you can carry your instrument anywhere safely.
  • Cut the Theophrastian yokes you made in the morning, learn how to use reed caps, and sound the first notes on your instrument. Circulate for 1:1 micro-lessons, 90 seconds with a tutor then 20 mins practising/listening/helping others, as many cycles as time allows.

Sunday 23 November, 9:30 – 17:00

Venue: Institut für Volksmusikforschung, Seminarraum AW U0213, Ungargasse 14/2. Stock, 1030 Wien

9:30 – 12:30  How and what to practise daily – developing a magical sound:

  • Circular breathing tips and tricks, using a mirror to eliminate unnecessary movement and tension, controlling the speed of interference beats, cultivating steadiness, smoothness, and ease in mind and body.
  • Multi-breath crescendo for embouchure development, eliminating bumps in the sound; cultivating pure intonation on unisons, 3rds, 4ths, and 5ths by modulating the pitch of one pipe only.
  • Relaxing shoulder and arm, training ear and embouchure by shuttling  between a major 3rd and a perfect 4th rhythmically. Exploring Asian style pitch vibrato, chromatic inflections (oxypykna and barypykna), and modulations between tonoi a semitone apart (high and low Phrygian, etc.), weighing up alternative approaches of ‘arm bending’ (moving one pipe in to sharpen and out to flatten) and ‘finger-bending’ (partially covering holes).

Shared lunch somewhere nearby

14:00 – 17:00  How and what to practise daily – training the fingers using ancient rhythms: 

  • Cuts (one finger lifts off its hole and is immediately replaced), cultivating a light touch to avoid injury, small movements for speed, and good rhythm so the brain commands the fingers with precision and musical intention.
  • Strikes (a raised finger strikes its hole and immediately returns to the raised position). Punching out short notes below a sustained pitch so the human brain perceives 2-part polyphony from a singlepipe, potentially 4-part polyphony from a doublepipe.
  • A group composition using the rhythm of the Sapphic stanza, accommodating syllables of varying length so that dancers and pipers are not obliged to know the words (a ‘dance-led’ approach).

Monday 24 November, 9:00 – 17:00

Venue: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2, 1010 Wien. Room tbc

09:00 – 13:00  Individual lessons and group rehearsals – giving and receiving feedback:

  • Having a go, receiving tutor feedback, observing others closely, listening to the feedback others receive, giving feedback yourself (in pairs), and practising on your own. We will use every available space, including outdoors.
  • Group rehearsal, developing an ensemble piece for ancient Egyptian pipes, composed collectively.

Shared lunch somewhere nearby

14:00 – 17:00  Individual lessons and group rehearsals – preparation for playing and training at home: 

  • Making sure your instrument is working well, knowing how to maintain it and how to prevent or resolve common difficulties that arise.
  • Making short videos to document what we have learned and created together: resources for home study tailored to the needs and interests of the group, Open Access resources to nourish the revival of ancient Egyptian doublepipes.

Workshop fee

The pricing reflects time and skill harvesting, curing, selecting, and processing the stems of Common reed and oat straw; testing experimental instruments in performance with singers and lute players; and refining results in a continuous cycle of learning. We guarantee that you will take home a doublepipe that not only respects archaeological evidence, but you will enjoy playing from day one. You can take home as many reeds as you can make.

  • Standard £440  Covers 18 hours of tutor time and all the materials required to take home a working doublepipe with decorated PVC case.
  • Supporter £560  In addition to the above, enable us to provide access for all, to run more events like this, and to create music and resources for students of Egyptian pipes.
  • Discounted £320  For participants who cannot afford the standard rate.

The workshop fee does not include refreshments, meals, or accommodation.

Register here

Gallery

ISGMA Presentation

Paper and performance on Thursday 20 November at the ISGMA conference, Austrian Academy of Sciences (17–21 November). Paper at 9:30; performance as part of the public concert at 19:00.

Twelve doublepipe halves in the Turin Egyptian Museum: a re-pairing puzzle

Barnaby Brown  –  Royal Conservatoire of Scotland  &  Lotos Lab  |  barnaby@lotos-lab.com

Marco Sciascia  –  Lotos Lab  |  marco@lotos-lab.com

ABSTRACT

The Turin Egyptian Museum possesses fifteen musical reed-pipes with a narrow bore (4–7 mm). Three are potentially singlepipes, which would require two hands to cover the six or eight fingerholes. The other twelve appear to be halves of doublepipes: each has three or four fingerholes, which can be covered using one hand. The museum also possesses a cylindrical case which probably contained most of them, but unfortunately we do not know which pipes were found together, or where any of them were found, although Thebes necropolis is likely. A divergent doublepipe, with a single player holding one pipe in each hand, is regularly portrayed  in art between the New Kingdom and Ptolemaic periods. The number of finds, sometimes in beautifully decorated cases, exceeds that of any other type of ancient Egyptian musical instrument. This talk and musical demonstration asks two questions: Can we determine which of the Turin pipes were originally played together? Given that human hands are symmetrical, how certain can we be that the tonal configuration with three holes on one pipe and four holes on the other was a sacred tradition linking Egypt c. 1100 BCE with Sumer c. 2450 BCE? Progress is made by analysing museum records; by comparing the observations of Victor Loret (1889, 1913) with those of Marco Sciascia, who made the reconstructions used in this presentation (from measurements he made in 2019 and 2021); and by comparing the originals in Turin with comparable finds in Philadelphia, Berlin, Paris, and London – doublepipes that were not mixed up before or after burial and are therefore definite pairs.

Binary Harmony Symposium Presentation

Paper to be delivered at the symposium Binary harmony in traditional music and beyond, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, 25–28 November 2025

Binary complements and the meaning of ‘yin yang’ cycles in pibroch

Barnaby Brown  –  Royal Conservatoire of Scotland  &  Lotos Lab  |  barnaby@lotos-lab.com

ABSTRACT

This presentation examines the phenomenon of reciprocity visible in the orderly harmonic forms favoured by ‘professors’ of piping in the Scottish islands of Mull and Skye in the eighteenth century. In source materials produced between the Battle of Culloden (1746) and the coronation of Queen Victoria (1838), sixty technical terms and 314 complex pieces for bagpipe are recorded. Many have multiple witnesses, which allows fluidity to be examined at a period in pibroch’s history before its musical notations became scripture. Performers evidently exercised significant creative agency between renditions of the same piece and between compositions based on the same binary cycle. Patterns of harmonic tension (O) and release (1) provided a common framework for composing, remembering, and recognising music. The pattern 11O1 was conventionally coupled with OO1O, and its elaboration 1O11 OO11 with O1OO 11OO. These ‘yin yang’ cycles, symmetrically balancing opposing sonorities, account for fifty-two percent of the repertory.

What are the cultural contexts, social values, and worldviews that this compositional behaviour reflects and reinforces? Insights will be gleaned by observing the musical and literary evidence closely, and by noticing similar behaviours beyond pibroch: in other cultural forms with prestigious lineages in Gaelic Scotland, in the binary cycles visible in medieval Welsh sources of harp music, and in the metrics of aulos-led song-dance (visible in the most popular forms of ancient Greek and Roman literature, most of which was sung to the accompaniment of solo pipes). Pibroch’s emic terminology suggests that besides managing uncertainty and stability, novelty and familiarity, emotion and reason in general ways, the reciprocity in its harmonic patterns reflects a warrior way of life: building and rowing warships; training and gathering energy for feats of endurance; releasing tension after extraordinary exertion; and tapping diving power, essentially cultivating connection with the superhuman forces of nature.

Biographies

Barnaby Brown plays reconstructions of pipes based on Stone Age, Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Late Antique originals. He also sings and plays the classical music of the Scottish bagpipe and leads the revival of its medieval predecessor, the triplepipe. His passion for giving very early instruments a contemporary voice led to four projects with Delphian Records – In Praise of Saint Columba: the sound world of the Celtic Church (2014), Spellweaving: ancient music from the Highlands of Scotland (2016), Set upon the Rood: new music for choir & ancient instruments (2017), and Apollo & Dionysus: sounds from Classical Antiquity (2018). Works written for him include Noli Pater by Sir James MacMillan (2015) and Il sogno di Marsia by Dario Marianelli (2022). In 2023, he co-founded Lotos Lab with Stef Conner and Marco Sciascia, developing musical instruments and fun activities that foster a sense of belonging across place and time.

Marco Sciascia has been studying the oldest musical instruments preserved in museums since 2005. For the European Music Archeology Project, he reconstructed the silver pipes of Ur (2450 BCE), the Poseidonia aulos (480 BCE), and Roman tibiae based on originals from Pompeii. His instruments became known through the concerts, recordings, and workshops that accompanied the touring exhibition ARCHÆOMUSICA (2013–18) and are played by professional musicians and students worldwide. Marco’s trans-historical lyre kit is finding its way into universities and primary schools, bringing the literature of ancient civilisations to life. His scholarly publications  include “Doublepipe reeds: Phragmites, straw, and data-logging for distributed reed research” in Journal of Music Archaeology 2 (2024). Marco is currently collaborating with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, making playable reconstructions of mechanised auloi found in Meroë, Sudan, in the burial site of Queen Amanishakheto (10 BCE). 

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