The Appearance of Music in Early Man
Since the bicameral nature is found in so many early life forms, we cannot help but wonder when and in what form Music first appeared. Paleontologists have long made the principal distinction between man and animal being the presence of speech. By this they mean speech as an independent textual language and this has led to centuries of philosophers attempting to discover the origin of speech. But this focus of their search completely ignores the fact that animals, without language, can still communicate feelings and emotions, as is obvious to anyone who has ever had a pet dog.
At the same time contemporary philologists all seem to agree that Music is older than Speech. By this they mean not Music as we use the term today but the use of vocal “musical like” sounds to communicate. And it seems safe to assume that the earliest forms of communication included the communication of feelings and emotions. Surely one of the most ancient examples must be that of the mother making cooing vocal sounds to lull her baby to sleep. And the earliest man was also using vocal sounds to communicate. One can imagine that if early man varied the vocal sound “Oh” to sound “Oh!” or “Oh?” he was altering the same basic vocal sound to communicate two different emotions. It is tempting here to wonder if the primary five vocal sounds, a–e–i–o–u, since they are found fundamental to all languages today, were the most ancient vocal sounds of mankind.
Here we must pause to introduce the word “mnemonic” (the first letter is silent, like the “p” of pneumonia) by which we mean using an expression to represent something else. Aristotle used this word as derived from the Greek mnemom to mean mindful. Today we use mnemonics as an aid to memory. I recall long ago my mother teaching me how to remember the names of the lines of the treble staff by remembering “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”
Now think of how ancient the example of the early man using a vocal symbol “Oh” as a mnemonic for a specific feeling must be. Looking backward in time, the oldest known left-brain language, also a form of mnemonics, dates from the relatively recent date of about 5,000 BC. From this period back to about 13,000 was the period during which there was a gradual shift from hunter–gather life styles to more sedentary communities.
Earlier, during the Upper Paleolithic Period (10,000–40,000 BC), evidence of rudimentary clothing is found, together with the period of living in caves. And from 40,000 years ago in Hohle Fels, a Swabian region of Southwest Germany, a flute has been found which has five finger holes and a V-shaped mouthpiece.
How much earlier can more primitive flutes be found? In one case, in a Stone Age cave in Southwest Germany, a 60,000 year old Neanderthal flute has been found! Even for so remote an age, the people who played these ancient flutes must surely have experienced feelings when they played. The proof is in the flute itself, for it suggests the player would not have gone to the trouble to make the instrument for any other reason than some form of personal fulfillment or enjoyment.
Therefore it seems evident that at some point during this very long period of time between the beginning of language, in 5,000 BC or so and the ancient flute players thousands of years earlier, the expression of feelings through Music had become a common practice. And this practice of Music, thousands of years before notation, was something the prospective student could only learn through personal association with a live musician. For this reason some people consider music teaching to be the oldest of all professions.
I first became astonished of the reality of the early practice of music before notation in 1966 when I had the opportunity, in cooperation with the U.S. State Department, to give French horn recitals in all the major cities of South America and Mexico. When in La Paz, Bolivia, I was strongly urged to go hear native musicians playing in a local coffee house. The owner of this establishment would fly out in a helicopter a few miles into the Altiplano, 14,000 feet and more above sea level, where people lived virtually as if still in the Stone Age, completely unconnected with modern civilization. He would then capture some musicians, bring them back to La Paz to perform, appearing in chains for dramatic effect, for his coffee house. After a few days in La Paz these musicians would make a culture leap of several thousand years into the present time, so the owner would let them go and fly out and capture some more natives to replace them in his coffee house.
The ensemble I was privileged to hear was extraordinary. They played with great emotion and musicianship, with surprising tonal and dynamic variety. Their instruments were simple instruments made by themselves. The flautist, for example, performed on a piece of bamboo, perhaps 8 inches long, with 5 holes punched in it to make possible diatonic music. His technique was truly incredible; he could play as many notes per second as any flute graduate from the Paris Conservatory.
This performance made a profound impression on me for two reasons. First, I realized that I was having the rarest opportunity, to hear musicians who had never been exposed to written music. If I would have held up before them a score from my recital program, they would have not recognized that what they were seeing was “Music” or that it had any relationship to what they were doing. No doubt they would have thought that they were simply looking at some foreign symbolic language, which indeed is what music notation is. I was experiencing a glimpse of a very distant time when all music was understood to be for the ear.
This thousands of years period when Music was only for the ear and not the eye finds its echo in the modern German language where in a rehearsal room what is on the music stand is called “the notes” (die Noten) and not “the music” (die Musik).
At some point during this very long ancient period of individual music-making attention would have automatically been drawn to the impact of Music on the listener. And from this moment on the use of Music for functional purposes occurred at the expense of its history as Art Music, of something just to communicate feelings. And when Music becomes functional, function often becomes more important that the Music itself. This is clearly illustrated in the history of the early Christian Church and its use of music in the liturgy. St. John Chrysostom (d. 407 AD) wrote regarding the sung form of the Latin service that, “Even if you don’t understand the words they are still the most important thing!”1 And the famous St. Augustine (354–430 AD) confessed that sometimes his attention was drawn to the music instead of the words. In such cases he felt he had sinned!2
When it comes to the consideration of the contributions of Music Theory or of philosophical writings on Music, the reader must remember that the performance came first and the discussions about music came later. Music was a particularly difficult topic for the early philosophers in particular because they could not even see music! Once the performance ended, the Music disappeared and could not be found, causing some to wonder if Music actually existed at all!
The one idea the ancient philosophers seemed to grasp was the question: Should man be governed by Reason or by their Emotions? The reader will immediately notice that these two terms are surrogates for left- and right-brain activity even though, of course, the ancient philosophers had not yet made any physical connection of this kind. In general it was the emotions for which those ancient philosophers had the most difficulty and the modern reader will find their views are often quite negative. Cicero (106–43 BC), as a case in point, could accept the idea that our senses were a natural part of nature, but he found the emotions were something quite different and clearly something to be avoided!
The emotions of the mind, which harass and embitter the life of the foolish. The Greek term for these is pathos, and I might have rendered this literally and styled them “diseases,” but the word “disease” would not suit all instances; for example, no one speaks of pity, nor yet anger, as a disease though the Greeks still termed these pathos. Let us then accept the term “emotion,” the very sound of which seems to denote something vicious, and these emotions are not excited by any natural influence. The list of the emotions is divided into four classes, with numerous subdivisions, namely sorrow, fear, lust, and that mental emotion which the Stoics call by a name that also denotes a bodily feeling, hedone, “pleasure,” but which I prefer to style “delight,” meaning the sensuous elation of the mind when in a state of exultation, these emotions, I say, are not excited by any influence of nature; they are all of them mere fancies and frivolous opinions. Therefore the Wise Man will always be free from them.3
And again, in his treatise, On Duties, sounding like an early Church father or later Puritan, St Augustine emphasizes that any display of emotions suggests that we are not in control of ourselves. The more highly developed person, he with a “greater soul,” must especially observe this warning. In spite of the strong warning he intends to give here, we cannot help noticing the indication that he had some awareness, no doubt through simple observation, that there are two sides of our being, those which here he calls thought and passion.
We must be careful that the movements of our soul do not diverge from nature, and the care must be all the greater as the soul is greater. We shall achieve this if we are careful not to reach states of extreme excitement or alarm and if we keep our minds intent on the preservation of decorum. The movements of our souls are of two kinds: some involve thought, others involve passion. Thought is mostly expended in seeking out the truth, passion urges men to action. Therefore we must take care to expend thought on the best objects and to make clear that our passions are obedient to our intellect … Throughout a man’s life the most correct advice is to avoid agitations, by which I mean excessive commotions in the soul that do not obey intelligence … Whenever passionate feelings disturb our activities, we are, of course, not acting with self-control and those around us cannot approve what we do.
And since Cicero probably anticipated that his warning, that “passions must be obedient to our intellect,” would fall on deaf ears, for as a last desperate effort he now paints for us contrasting pictures of the man under the influence of emotion and the man who has succeeded in subjecting his emotions to Reason.
The man whom we see on fire and raging with lusts frantically pursuing everything with insatiable desire, and the more lavishly he swallows down pleasure from all quarters, the worse and more burning his thirst—would you not be entitled to call him most unhappy? The man who is carried away with frivolity and empty euphoria and uncontrolled desires, is he not the more wretched the happier he thinks he is?
So just as these people are wretched, so are those happy whom no fears alarm, no distresses gnaw, no lusts arouse, no pointless euphoria dissolves in languorous pleasure. Just as the sea is recognized as calm when not even the slightest breeze ruffles the waves, so a state of mind can be accounted calm and peaceful, when there is no disturbance by which it can be agitated.4
Aristides Quintilianus, who lived between the 1st and 4th centuries AD and was one of the last of the ancient Greek philosophers, looked back and confessed that Reason was incapable of controlling the emotions.
No cure could be found in Reason alone for those who were burdened by these emotions; for pleasure is a very powerful temptation, captivating even the animals that lack reason, and grief which remains unsliced casts many people into incurable illnesses.5
He is one of many witnesses who speak of the ancient Greeks’ using music to mold character and he also points out that it was their belief that music could do what Reason could not, with respect to the control of the emotions. He tells us that the ancients made everyone cultivate music from childhood throughout their lives in order that the proper kind of music would have a positive impact on the soul. The effectiveness of music in doing this he compares to the “diverting of a stream, which was rushing through impassable crags or dispersing itself in marshy places, into an easily trodden and fertile plain.” One of the chief concerns of the ancients, he tells us, was with regard to the misuse of music.
Those who neglected music, melody and unaccompanied poetry alike, were utterly crude and foolish; those who had involved themselves in it in the wrong way fell into serious errors, and through their passion for worthless melodies and poetry stamped upon themselves ugly idiosyncrasies of character.
It was this concern, he recalls, which caused the authorities to assign “educational music to as many as 100 days, and the relaxing kind [of music] to no more than 30.” He does not entirely condemn entertainment music, but in granting its place he still does not waver from the principal value of music, to form character.
We should not avoid song altogether just because it gives pleasure. Not all delight is to be condemned, but neither is delight itself the objective of music. Amusement may come as it will, but the aim set for music is to help us toward virtue.
He points to the success of the Greeks in doing just that and concludes,
Music is the most powerful agent of education, rivaled by no other, [and it can be shown where music education was missing] that our characters commonly deteriorate if they are left undisciplined, lapsing into base or brutal passions.
Notes
- Exposition of Psalm XII. ↩︎
- “On Music,” X. ↩︎
- Cicero, De Finibus, III, x, 35. ↩︎
- Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, V, 15ff. ↩︎
- Quoted in Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), II, 457ff. ↩︎
READ NEXT: Chapter 3, The Shift to Finding Emotional Meaning in Performance
