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HISTORY OF
MUSIC
This article gives the history of music in general from the
earliest times and includes accounts of primitive and oriental music. The
history and development of the various branches of music and of musical
instruments may be found under the appropriate headings, such as FOLK-MUSIC;
OPERA; SONG; VIOLIN etc. The articles DANCE FORMS AND MUSICAL FORMS
contain short descriptions of most shorter musical forms, while the more
important forms have separate entries, e.g. SONATA; SYMPHONY.
The origins of music are still
a matter of the greatest speculation. On the one hand the
anthropologists have put forward theories seeking to show
the bearing upon music’s origins of the imitation of natural
sounds, of the uses of sounds as signals, and of the ancient
sound-languages which they see as possible sources common to
both music and speech. On the other hand the traditional
philosophers and metaphysicians of many epochs, whose
doctrines continue to echo down the ages, proclaim a divine
origin, a harmony of the spheres, a cosmic harmony whence
human harmony must ultimately stem. Each theory looks
tenaciously at one or other part of the field, and though a
testing of them all may give us considerable insight into
the answer since (although many early stages may be
inferred) music’s origins in any case fall outside the range
of actual observation.
PRIMITIVE RACES
Because of the inherent conservatism of primitive races there is
little reason to suppose that their music has greatly changed over long
periods. A study of the main feature of surviving primitive music must give
a broad idea of primitive music in antiquity. Africa, America and
Australia, where aboriginal races survive in umbers, offer the richest
fields.
Primitive music is characteristically performed in connection
with tribal custom and ritual, rarely for its own sake. Thus, among the
North American Indians appropriate songs are found for religious ceremonial
and magic, success in war, courtship, healing the sick, games and children.
The ritual connection of music frequently links it with words, thus placing
primary emphasis on the power of the voice, the earliest instrument known to
man. Vocal music is frequently accompanied by instruments, and music for
instruments alone is sometimes found, especially as an accompaniment to the
dance. The flute, symbol of fertility, is characteristically used over a
wide area for dances and songs of harvest and courtship, the drum, symbol of
female essence, revered as a sacred object.
The spirit of primitive music varies much with tribal character, from the
dignity and restraint of the dignity and restraint of the Red Indians to the
unbridled emotionalism of the African, the musical resources employed to
clothe the spirit being equally varied tin the respective use of a disjunct
and conjunct sequence of notes in melodies. Differences are found no less
in the method of vocal performance, which may be anything from a throaty
croaking delivery to a reedy nasal twang. The range of notes used in
primitive melodies varies much according to the degree of civilization in
which the race finds itself: the Patagonian Indians and Veddas of Ceylon are
said to be restricted to two notes only, whilst more advanced tribes employ
a full octave or an even wider range. The scales used are rarely more than
five-notes scales, that is, five notes within the octave, the smaller
intervals of ‘civilized’ scales being unusual.
Though largely confined to a single line of
melody, primitive music knows other resources: voices sing
in parallel at different pitches among the east African
Bantu; the principle of imitation found in civilized
‘rounds’ is used among the Semang of Malacca; heterophony.
is wide-spread, being found especially in Africa; and
elements of simple but true polyphony are found among races
with instruments of percussion having a definite pitch, such
as the xylophones of the South African Pangwe.
Rhythms differ widely. Very free rhythms are
employed in the ceremonial incantations of medicine men in
magic, exorcism and hypnotic cures. A large regular
rhythmical accompaniment by drums and other instruments of
percussion, varying from the single, equal, detached strokes
of the Red Indians to the involved cross-rhythms of a
multitude of drums inconceivable to races having no living
indigenous dance. dance. dance. dance. dance. dance. dance. dance. dance.
The full significance of primitive music in
musical history is not yet clear. Some authorities regard
it as the folk-music of social groups not possessing an
art-music; others see in it the rude groupings after some
sort of artistic system; and, from the many fundamental
similarities it shows with the supremely civilized art of
oriental races, there is something to be said for the view
that, in some instances, ‘primitive’ music may represent the
degenerate remains of a once great art.
THE FAR EAST
The world’s earliest surviving musical notation, an isolated
Sumerian hymn recorded on a tablet of c. 800 B.C.,
unfortunately continues to defy satisfactory
interpretation. Although much of the ancient music of the
east has now gone beyond recall, the system on which it was
based has largely survived in the written records of the
Chinese and Hindus, or may be inferred from classical
references to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, and some
features live on in oral tradition.
The old oriental authorities
look back to a golden age when their music was at its
height, flowering in conformity with principles which were
revealed to the early sages and founders of civilization.
‘Developments viewed in the west as almost synonymous with
progress, are in the east regarded simply as elaborations of
an original unchanging system or, more usually, as
corruptions of it.
Although the musical resources of eastern races
differ more greatly one from the other, both spiritually and
technically, than do those of the western races, certain
features are common to all. Broadly speaking, each race has
a folk-music and a cultivated art-music ( both of which are
characteristically linked with racial customs) and a music
for sacred use. Religion has played a dominant part in
shaping musical systems and creating musical forms which,
spreading out into secular life, have helped to mould the
music of the courts and people also. In the service of
religion, music is found alongside poetry, drama and dance
or ritual movement, being usually subordinated to these and
rarely occurring independently of one or other of them.
Like the other arts, it is regarded as a ritual means of
preparing the human organism for perceiving reality, and
thus has, in its turn, been much molded by efforts to
perceive this very reality.
And so it is that oriental musical systems were,
at their foundation, cosmological in character. In
Mesopotamia, music under the Sumerians (from c. 3000 .C.)
was thus founded and thus remained during the first
Babylonian period until the marked rise of popular music
during the Assyrian period (c. 1200 c.600 B.C.) under the
influence of the more sensuous music from Asia and Egypt.
In China, which has musical history traceable to the third
millennium B.C., the Huang chung (yellow bell), or
principal musical tone, was for many centuries regarded as
the sacred cosmogony foundation of the state. The political
importance of music was early formulated by Confucius
(551-479 B.C), a century before Plato quite independently
propounded a similar theory in Greece.
The linkage of music with symbolism has molded
the very forms of the scales used. Scales very much in
different regions. Various types of five-note (pentatonic)
scale are used in China, Japan and Java. India, though
preserving a pentatonic scale in a limited way, chiefly uses
seven –(occasionally eight-and nine-) note scales, variously
constructed from the 22 notes into which its octave is
divided.ivided.ivided.ivided.
On the scales are constructed melody-types,
called maqam among the Arabs and raga among the Hindus, who
use over one hundred of them, each raga having its own
emotional significance and appropriate time for
performance. The melody-types formulas serve as a basis for
improvisation. Nation has been rare and from the oriental
point of view would have served no useful purpose since
performed music is regarded as a transitory form based on
the one immutable system, and it would tend to discourage
the free improvisatory element. The time-measures which
give life to the music, called tala among the Hindus (cf.
Arabic iqa), can reach a complexity unknown in the west.
Oriental music is mostly conceived for the
voice; nevertheless, music for instruments alone sometimes
reaches impressive heights. In the classical period of
Chinese music, during the T’ang (618-907) and sung
(960-1284) dynasties, and of earlier origin, huge orchestras
of 300 or more players were regularly employed in the
temples and at the courts. The tradition survives in the
smaller gamelan of Java, which consists of a highly
organized body of players of various types of chime
instrument together with drums and gongs (and occasionally
fiddles and flutes), forming an orchestra found in the
villages and at the provincial courts for dancing and other
festivities. After being much influenced by the more static
Chinese art, the music of Java developed it s own exuberant
style in contrast.ntrast.
Much oriental music consists of a single line of
melody only; there is no real harmony (q.v) in the western
sense (much of the expressive subtlety of oriental melody
would be thus proscribed), neither is there, save in rare
instances, simultaneous combination of one melody with
another in counterpoint. But the base note held below the
melody, such as survives in the west in the drone of the
Celtic bagpipe, is characteristic, and heterophony is found
especially in China, java and Japan.
Heterophony is a practice in which the original
melody, as performed by one musician, is accompanied by
itself in n embellished form in the hands of another
musician, but in such a way as not to stray unintelligibly
far from its original contour. This art has possibilities
as diverse as those of western harmony and counterpoint,
with a realization no less impressive in the performance.
When numerous players thus decorate a melody in different
ways, a massive harmonic effect can result.result.
The 19 The 19 The 19 The 19th and 20th
centuries have witnessed a marked decline in the music of
the east. It has lot sight of its high position as a
religious, political and social force and its gradually
being replaced by noisy substitutes, a process much hastened
by the invasion of western music, usually that of the film.
though sometimes producing quite charming results, the
influence of western music and the activities of western
musicians are increasingly persuading the oriental peoples
to neglect their own unique tradition. Eastern music has so
far had no comparable influence on the art of the west since
ancient times.
THE NEAR EAST
The near east occupied a significant position in
the music of antiquity and became the mainspring of the
descended. The origin of this great tradition lay in
Mesopotamia and Egypt as early as the eth and 3rd
millennia B.C., when music was a restrained art of a
strictly liturgical nature. In Egypt the main instruments
were harp and flute. fro the New Kingdom (c. 1567 B.C.),
orchestras became larger; the desire became more like that
of south-west Asia. During the reign of Amosis II (568-526
B.C), however, efforts were made to restore the ancient
ritual music. It is the principles of this music which
Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) is believed to have
brought back to Greece, and it is similarly to the Egyptian
music of the reformed period that the writings of Plato (c.
427-347 B.C) and others refer.
The Greek word ‘music’ was contrasted with
‘gymnastic’ to denote the culture of the soul as
distinguished from that of the body. Whilst singing and the
setting of lyric poetry formed part of it, the Greek
conception of music included the arts great civilizing
factor, linking it with moral education and government.
They expounded, too, the doctrine of the ethos, or effects
of the different modes on men.on men.
Although the ancient Greco-Egyptian music is no
longer accessible, apart from a few fragments of rather
ancient theoretical systems, derived by Greece from Egypt
and to some extent from Mesopotamia, have come down to us.
The traditions about Pythagoras, as formulated by Euclid
(c.300 B.C), and the writings and his pupil Aristoxenus (fl.
c. 350 B.C) and others, and the later writings of the
Neopythagoreans, including Iamblichus (died A.D 363) and the
Neoplatonist, including Plotinus (204/5-270) and Porphyry
(c.230-302), were transmitted through the late Roman
writers, Boethius (c. 480-524) and cassiodorus (c.477-570),
whose works, representing the last bastion of pagan theory,
undoubtedly had a profound influence on European music
during the middle ages. The work of Claudius Ptolemaeus of
Alexandria (2nd century) is also important.
Greek theory later influenced the music of
Islam, the writings of al-kindi (died 873), al-Farabi (died
e. 950) and Avicenna (980-1037) and other scholiasts being
largely based upon it. In this manner Europe received two
musical legacies from Greece, the one through Rome and the
other later through Islam as a result of the Arab domination
of Spain (711-1085). Mean while a new and great religion
was born, and with it arose a new form of music.
Resources which could serve the powerful spirit
of Christianity were not lacking. The tradition of the
temple music in Jerusalem ,going back to the splendid age of
Solomon when 120 trumpets and the singing of the
congregation sounded as with one voice, survived until the
destruction of the second temple in A.D 70. Thereafter the
instrumental music largely perished though the shofar or
ram’s horn is still sounded as a signal in the synagogue
today. Although much Jewish music later came under gentile
influences, some of the pre-Christian chant is believed to
survive yet, little altered, among the Jewish communities of
south west Asia, and the chatting or ‘Cantillation’ of the
Bible according to fixed melodic formulas still survives in
the synagogue.agogue.
Not only elements of the Jewish chant but also
the musical theory of the classical Greek world, together
with countless other influences, met in the cultural
crucible of the near east. Under the intense heat of the
Christian vision a new form of chant emerged, possibly at
Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. After
Constantine’s edict of Milan in 313, tolerating Christians
throughout the whole empire, conditions became more
favorable for the organization of music, and the new
Byzantine chant became established, shortly to be followed
by the formulation of the chants of the other Christians
communities in the east American and Syrian, Coptic and
Ethiopian. The chant flowered greatly between the 4th
and the 11th centuries and, through I later underwent many
changes, eastern Christianity preserves its own musical
tradition today.
The Christian church had meanwhile been
establishing itself in the west under the authority of Rome,
amidst the turmoil and destruction leading up to and
attendant upon the fall of the Roman Empire. Her
monasteries and cathedrals became important centers of
musical learning and throughout the middle ages, up of the
14th century, were responsible for most of the
developments of music as an art.
The first important effort to find a stable
basis for the Roman chant was that of Ambrose, bishop of
Milan (374-97). St. Ambrose recognized Latin as the
official language of the liturgy, and the character of the
language left its mark still be heard in Millan, ambrosian
chant was largely superseded by Gregorian chant, named
after Pope Gregory I (590-604) who, like Ambrose, came to a
great extent under the Byzantine influence which be absorbed
in Constantinople.
The modes of the chant are linked with the
ancient Greek modes and, though the order of the Greek names
was later confused, to this day bear the names of districts
in ancient Greece. The four principal modes authorized in
Gregory’s time were called Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and
MixoLydian. The Aeolian mode, whose notes correspond to
those of the modern minor scale, was not used and the
Ionian, whose notes correspond to those of the modern major
scale was forbidden as being too gay, as its mediaeval Latin
name modus lascivious implies.
Gregorian chant, an important unifying factor in
the west, finally replaced all the other music dialects
which the western church developed the Mozarabic or Visigoth
chant in Spain, which lasted until the IIth century, the
Galician chant in the western Frankish kingdom replaced in
the 8th century, and the Celtic chant in Britain,
which persisted until the late middle ages in Wales and
Ireland. During the 5th and 6th
centuries, a period of western barbarian expansion, Ireland
became a great refuge from Europe, and her musical art, like
her church, much under the influence of the near east,
achieved remarkable heights.
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