Music 326/526

The Earliest Music and Ancient Civilizations

Theories about the earliest music:

·        An attempt to communicate, perhaps concurrent with early speech

·        Instrumental Music as well: e.g. cave paintings from South of France

·        Evidence: Iconology (studying a subject through pictures) and Artifacts (actual instruments found)

“The Pre-Modern Mind”

·        Fundamental difference between “modern world” and what came before: our ideology is (supposedly) based on rationalism; theirs was inherently religious or spiritual.

·        Superstition was fundamental from pre-historic times through Middle Ages

The Ancient World: the most relevant precursors to Western art music are in ancient Middle East.

·        Mesopotamia or the “Cradle of Civilization:” region between Tigres and Euphrates rivers; now known as Iraq.  This area had a succession of cultures influencing it from 4000 BC on

·        No treatises on music from the earliest part of this period, but one example of written notation (undecipherable). We also have pictures and specimens of instruments

·        Sumerians: first ancient culture in Mesopotamia: 3500-2000 BC.

·        Wide variety of instruments: reed pipes, vertical flutes, lyres, harps, kitharas, drums, clappers, sistrum (frame with rattling cross-bars)

·        Hornbostel & Sachs classifications of instruments:

·        Membranophones (skin vibration)

·        Chordophones (string vibration)

·        Aerophones (air column vibration)

·        Idiophones (whole instrument vibrates: rattles, cymbals etc)

·        All of these types are found in Sumerian music

·        Words from extant examples suggest responsorial or antiphonal singing.  Most ancient singing was probably monophonic (single line of music, unharmonized)

·        Other texture descriptions include polyphonic (multiple lines of music sounding together), homophonic (block chords moving in the same rhythm or a melody over a static harmony), and heterophonic (different versions of the same melody sounding together)

·        The example with musical notation probably dates from Sumerian(maybe Babylonian) time: a hymn on creation of man with both words and musical notation.  No one has deciphered the music, but scholars think that the musical symbols refer to melodic patterns, not individual notes

·        Babylonians: Sumerians gave way around 2000 BC; Babylonians ruled Mesopotamia around 2000 to1000 BC.  They enlarged array of instruments, refined designs; oboes and lutes found from this time

·        Assyrians: Ruled from 1000 to 600 BC, “Renaissance of the Ancient Middle East.”

·        There was much more interaction with other areas, especially Egypt

·        Evidence of music for secular purposes: festivals and feasts, public performances

·        Egypt: Another region of ancient civilization. Earliest civilization was around 3000 BC.

·        Instruments seen in paintings and found in tombs

·        Art work shows music was for religious purposes, probably arising from rituals:

·        Rattles and clappers could be used to drive away evil spirits

·        Later more elaborate services included chanting, sometimes instruments (symbols of divine power)

·        Old Empire(3000-1580 BC) instruments were soft-sounding (harps, vertical flutes, double reed-pipes)

·        New Kingdom(ca.1600-1090 BC) switched to louder instruments like shawms and trumpets.  Suggests influence from China where these instruments originated

·        In Old Kingdom, music was an elite art; when East Asian instruments became popular, upper classes preserved old styles and instruments

·        After c. 1500 BC, musical life became more active and secular songs and dancing music were added to the religious music

·        Ancient Jewish Music:  Knowledge here is even more limited than Egypt

·        No written notation, but they had Chironomy: system of hand movements to indicate melodic contour. Early written notation may be derived from written tracing of hand movements

·        Instruments: great variety: one study indicates 145different musical instruments mentioned in the Bible.

·        Jewish Service: scholars used to think early Christian services modeled after Jewish ones; now there is controversy on this point. 2 types of service:

·        Temple service was mostly sacrifice (twice a day); musical portion was singing of psalms, parts of the Pentateuch (first 5 books of Bible)

·        Synagogue was originally for holy readings appropriate to the calendar.  Not much music included; later, after Destruction of (second) Temple of Jerusalem (70 AD), some temple practices came into synagogue including singing of psalms

·        Ancient Greece (800-c.350BC): of all ancient cultures, we know most about Greece. Both secular and sacred music extremely important to society

·        Music was a central part of education because of the Doctrine of Ethos: Music affects character, different kinds of music affect character differently.  Different “kinds” of music were defined by modal content, also by instruments used

·        Modes: Dorian was manly, strong, ennobling; Phrygian was passionate, headstrong; Lydian effeminate, lascivious; Mixolydian sad, mournful; Hypodorian exciting.

·        Secular music: poetry and drama (Aristophanes, Sophocles) often set to music in ancient Greece.  Music also used at Games(Pythian every 4 yrs at Delphi in honor of Apollo)

·        Primary sources: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle The Politics, and especially Aristoxenus Harmonic Elements (ca.330 BC). Music closely connected with mysticism, metaphysics, astronomy, number symbolism.  Music inseparable from numerical concepts: Greeks thought numbers were the key to all existence.  Also a few fragments of music are valuable primary sources, such as Seikilos Epitaph inscribed on a tombstone, around 1^stcentury AD.  Has clear rhythmic notation

·        Ethos of music was the result of three factors: rhythm, genus, mode

·        Rhythm is easiest: determined by long and short syllables of text.  Instrumental music used same rhythmic(metric) patterns as poetry.

·        Genus: basic unit of pitch was tetrachord.  Pythagoras mathematically determined size of diatonic intervals around 500 BC. A tetrachord’s outer pitches were a 4th apart, inner two notes moveable.  Configurations of 4 notes were the different genera. Combining tetrachords results in a 2-octave scale; Greeks called it the GreaterPerfect System (GPS).  With GPS, you could create melodies that would stay in a key or tonos; Lesser Perfect System was created to enable modulation from one tonos to another.

·        Mode: a more abstract concept: an octave segment of GPS with a characteristic pattern of tones and semitones (like a scale); but the concept also includes characteristic melodic formulas, rhythmic and poetic forms.  Combination of all of these characteristics gives a mode its “ethic” quality.