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Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired.

BOETHIUS¹

No culture so far discovered lacks music. Making music appears to be one of the fundamental activities of mankind; as characteristically human as drawing and painting. The survival of Palaeolithic cave-paintings bears witness to the antiquity of this form of art; and some of these paintings depict people dancing. Flutes made of bone found in these caves suggest that they danced to some form of music. But, because music itself only survives when the invention of a system of notation has made a written record possible, or else when a living member of a culture recreates the sounds and rhythms which have been handed down to him by his forebears, we have no information about prehistoric music. We are therefore accustomed to regarding drawing and painting as integral parts of the life of early man, but less inclined to think of music in the same way. However, music, or musical sounds of some variety, are so interwoven with human life that they probably played a greater part in prehistory than can ever be determined.

When biologists consider complex human activities such as the arts, they tend to assume that their compelling qualities are derivations of basic drives. If any given activity can be seen to aid survival or facilitate adaptation to the environment, or to be derived from behaviour which does so, it ‘makes sense’ in biological terms. For example, the art of painting may originate from the human need to comprehend the external world through vision; an achievement which makes it possible to act upon the environment or influence it in ways which promote survival. The Palaeolithic artists who drew and painted animals on the walls of their caves were using their artistic skills for practical reasons. Drawing is a form of abstraction which may be compared with the formation of verbal concepts. It enables the draughtsman to study an object in its absence; to experiment with various images of it, and thus, at least in phantasy, to exert power over it. These artists were magicians, who painted and drew animals in order to exercise magical charms upon them. By capturing the image of the animal, early humans probably felt that they could partially control it. Since the act of drawing sharpens the perceptions of the artist by making him pay detailed attention to the forms he is trying to depict, the Palaeolithic painter did in reality learn to know his prey more accurately, and therefore increased his chances of being successful in the hunt. The art historian Herbert Read wrote:

Far from being an expenditure of surplus energy, as earlier theories have supposed, art, at the dawn of human culture, was a key to survival, a sharpening of the faculties essential to the struggle for existence. Art, in my opinion, has remained a key to survival.²

The art of literature probably derived from that of the primitive story-teller. He was not merely providing entertainment, but passing down to his listeners a tradition of who they were, where they had come from, and what their lives signified. By making sense and order out of his listeners’ existence, he was enhancing their feeling of personal worth in the scheme of things and therefore increasing their capacity to deal effectively with the social tasks and relationships which made up their lives. The myths of a society usually embody its traditional values and moral norms. Repetition of these myths therefore reinforces the coherence and unity of the society, as well as giving each individual a sense of meaning and purpose. Both painting and literature can be understood as having developed from activities which, originally, were adaptively useful.

But what use is music? Music can certainly be regarded as a form of communication between people; but what it communicates is not obvious. Music is not usually representational: it does not sharpen our perception of the external world, nor, allowing for some notable exceptions,^*does it generally imitate it. Nor is music propositional: it does not put forward theories about the world or convey information in the same way as does language.

There are two conventional ways in which one can approach the problem of the significance of music in human life. One is to examine its origins. Music today is highly developed, complex, various and sophisticated. If we could understand how it began, perhaps we could better understand its fundamental meaning. The second way is to examine how music has actually been used. What functions has music served in different societies throughout history?

There is no general agreement about the origins of music. Music has only tenuous links with the world of nature. Nature is full of sound, and some of nature’s sounds, such as running water, may give us considerable pleasure. A survey of sound preferences amongst people in New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica and Switzerland revealed that none disliked the sounds of brooks, rivers and waterfalls, and that a high proportion enjoyed them.³ But nature’s sounds, with the exception of bird-song and some other calls between animals, are irregular noises rather than the sustained notes of definable pitch which go to form music. This is why the sounds of which Western music is composed are referred to as ‘tones’: they are separable units with constant auditory waveforms which can be repeated and reproduced.

Although science can define the differences between tones in terms of pitch, loudness, timbre, and waveform, it cannot portray the relation between tones which constitutes music. Whilst there is still considerable dispute concerning the origins, purpose, and significance of music, there is general agreement that it is only remotely related to the sounds and rhythms of the natural world. Absence of external association makes music unique amongst the arts; but since music is closely linked with human emotions, it cannot be regarded as no more than a disembodied system of relationships between sounds. Music has often been compared with mathematics; but, as G. H. Hardy pointed out, ‘Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot.’⁴

If music were merely a series of artificial constructs comparable with decorative visual patterns, it would induce a mild aesthetic pleasure, but nothing more. Yet music can penetrate the core of our physical being. It can make us weep, or give us intense pleasure. Music, like being in love, can temporarily transform our whole existence. But the links between the art of music and the reality of human emotions are difficult to define; so difficult that, as we shall see, many distinguished musicians have abandoned any attempt to do so, and have tried to persuade us that musical works consist of disembodied patterns of sound which have no connection with other forms of human experience.

Can music be related to the sounds made by other species? The most obviously ‘musical’ of such sounds are those found in bird-song. Birds employ both noises and tones in their singing; but the proportion of definable tones is often high enough for some people to rate some bird-songs as ‘music’. Bird-song has a number of different functions. By locating the singer, it both advertises a territory as desirable, and also acts as a warning to rivals. Birds in search of a mate sing more vigorously than those who are already mated, thus supporting Darwin’s notion that song was originally a sexual invitation. Bird-song is predominantly a male activity, dependent upon the production of the male sex hormone, testosterone, although duets between male and female occur in some species. Given sufficient testosterone, female birds who do not usually sing will master the same repertoire of songs as the male.⁵

Charles Hartshorne, the American ornithologist and philosopher, claims that bird-song shows variation of both pitch and tempo: accelerando, crescendo, diminuendo, change of key, and variations on a theme. Some birds, like the Wood thrush Hylochicla mustelina, have a repertoire of as many as nine songs which can follow each other in a variety of different combinations. Hartshorne argues:

Bird songs resemble human music both in the sound patterns and in the behavior setting. Songs illustrate the aesthetic mean between chaotic irregularity and monotonous regularity … The essential difference from human music is in the brief temporal span of the bird’s repeatable patterns, commonly three seconds or less, with an upper limit of about fifteen seconds. This limitation conforms to the concept of primitive musicality. Every simple musical device, even transposition and simultaneous harmony, occurs in bird music.⁶

He goes on to state that birds sing far more than is biologically necessary for the various forms of communication. He suggests that bird-song has partially escaped from practical usage to become an activity which is engaged in for its own sake: an expression of avian joie de vivre.

Singing repels rival males, but only when nearby; and it attracts mates. It is persisted in without any obvious immediate result, and hence must be largely self-rewarding. It expresses no one limited emotional attitude and conveys more information than mere chirps or squeaks. In all these ways song functions like music.⁷

Other observers disagree, claiming that bird-song is so biologically demanding that it is unlikely to be produced unless it is serving some useful function.

Is it possible that human music originated from the imitation of bird-song? Géza Révész, who was a professor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam and a friend of Béla Bartók, dismisses this possibility on two counts. First, if human music really began in this way, we should be able to point to examples of music resembling bird-song in isolated pre-literate communities. Instead, we find complex rhythmic patterns bearing no resemblance to avian music. Second, bird-song is not easily imitated. Slowing down modern recordings of bird-songs has demonstrated that they are even more complicated than previously supposed; but one only has to listen to a thrush singing in the garden to realize that imitation of his song is technically difficult. Liszt’s ‘Légende’ for solo piano, ‘St François d’Assise: La Prédication aux oiseaux’, manages to suggest the twittering of birds in ways which are both ingenious and musically convincing. I have heard a tape of American bird-song which persuasively suggests that Dvořák incorporated themes derived from it following his sojourn in the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa. Olivier Messiaen made more use of bird-song in his music than any other composer. But these are sophisticated, late developments in the history of music. It is probable that early man took very little notice of bird-song, since it bore scant relevance to his immediate concerns.⁸

Lévi-Strauss affirms that music is in a special category compared with the other arts, and also agrees that bird-song cannot be the origin of human music.

If, through lack of verisimilitude, we dismiss the whistling of the wind through the reeds of the Nile, which is referred to by Diodorus, we are left with little but bird song – Lucretius’ liquidas avium voces – that can serve as a natural model for music. Although ornithologists and acousticians agree about the musicality of the sounds uttered by birds, the gratuitous and unverifiable hypothesis of the existence of a genetic relation between bird song and music is hardly worth discussing.⁹

Stravinsky points out that natural sounds, like the murmur of the breeze in the trees, the rippling of a brook or the song of a bird, suggest music to us but are not themselves music: ‘I conclude that tonal elements become music only by virtue of their being organized, and that such organization presupposes a conscious human act.’¹⁰

It is not surprising that Stravinsky emphasizes organization as the leading feature of music, since he himself was one of the most meticulous, orderly, and obsessionally neat composers in the history of music. But his emphatic statement is surely right. Bird-song has some elements of music in it, but, although variations upon inherited patterns occur, it is too obviously dependent upon in-built templates to be compared with human music.

In general, music bears so little resemblance to the sounds made by other species that some scholars regard it as an entirely separate phenomenon. This is the view of the ethnomusicologist John Blacking, who was, until his untimely death, Professor of Social Anthropology at the Queen’s University of Belfast, as well as being an accomplished musician.

There is so much music in the world that it is reasonable to suppose that music, like language and possibly religion, is a species-specific trait of man. Essential physiological and cognitive processes that generate musical composition and performance may even be genetically inherited, and therefore present in almost every human being.¹¹

If music is indeed species-specific, there might seem to be little point in comparing it with the sounds made by other species. But those who have studied the sounds made by subhuman primates, and who have discovered what functions these sounds serve, find interesting parallels with human music. Gelada monkeys produce a wide variety of sounds of different pitches which accompany all their social interactions. They also use many different rhythms, accents, and types of vocalization. The particular type of sound which an individual produces indicates his emotional state at the time and, in the longer term, aids the development of stable bonds between different individuals. When tensions between individuals exist, these can sometimes be resolved by synchronizing and coordinating vocal expressions.

Human beings, like geladas, also use rhythm and melody to resolve emotional conflicts. This is perhaps the main social function served by group singing in people … Music is the ‘language’ of emotional and physiological arousal. A culturally agreed-upon pattern of rhythm and melody, i.e., a song, that is sung together, provides a shared form of emotion that, at least during the course of the song, carries along the participants so that they experience their bodies responding emotionally in very similar ways. This is the source of the feeling of solidarity and good will that comes with choral singing: people’s physiological arousals are in synchrony and in harmony, at least for a brief period. It seems possible that during the course of human evolution the use of rhythm and melody for the purposes of speaking sentences grew directly out of its use in choral singing. It also seems likely that geladas singing their sound sequences together synchronously and harmoniously also perhaps experience such a temporary physiological synchrony.¹²

We shall return to the subject of group arousal in the next chapter. Meanwhile, let us consider some other speculations about the origin of music.

One theory is that music developed from the lalling of infants. All infants babble, even if they are born deaf or blind. During the first year of life, babbling includes tones as well as approximations to words: the precursors of music and language cannot be separated. According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, who has conducted research into the musical development of small children:

The first melodic fragments produced by children around the age of a year or fifteen months have no strong musical identity. Their undulating patterns, going up and down over a very brief interval or ambitus, are more reminiscent of waves than of particular pitch attacks. Indeed, a quantum leap, in an almost literal sense, occurs at about the age of a year and a half, when for the first time children can intentionally produce discrete pitches. It is as if diffuse babbling had been supplanted by stressed words.¹³

During the next year, children make habitual use of discrete pitches, chiefly using seconds, minor thirds, and major thirds. By the age of two or two and a half, children are beginning to notice and learn songs sung by others. Révész is quite sure that the lalling melodies produced by children in their second year are already conditioned by songs which they have picked up from the environment or by other music to which they have been exposed.¹⁴ If lalling melodies are in fact dependent upon musical input from the environment, it is obviously inadmissible to suggest that music itself developed from infant lalling.

Ellen Dissanayake, who teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York and who has lived in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, persuasively argues that music originated in the ritualized verbal exchanges which go on between mothers and babies during the first year of life. In this type of interchange, the most important components of language are those which are concerned with emotional expressiveness rather than with conveying factual information. Metre, rhythm, pitch, volume, lengthening of vowel sounds, tone of voice, and other variables are all characteristic of a type of utterance which has much in common with poetry. She writes:

No matter how important lexico-grammatical meaning eventually becomes, the human brain is first organized or programmed to respond to emotional/intonational aspects of the human voice.¹⁵

Since infants in the womb react both to unstructured noise and to music with movements which their mothers can feel, it seems likely that auditory perception prompts the baby’s first realization that there is something beyond itself to which it is nevertheless related. After birth, vocal interchange between mother and infant continues to reinforce mutual attachment, although vision soon becomes equally important. The crooning, cooing tones and rhythms which most mothers use when addressing babies are initially more significant in cementing the relationship between them than the words which accompany these vocalizations. This type of communication continues throughout childhood. If, for example, I play with a child of eighteen months who can only utter a few words, we can communicate in all kinds of ways which require no words at all. It is probable that both of us will make noises: we will chuckle, grunt, and make the kinds of sounds which accompany chasing and hiding games. We may establish, at least for the time being, a relationship which is quite intimate, but nothing which passes between us needs to be expressed in words. Moreover, although relationships between adults usually involve verbal interchange, they do not always do so. We can establish relationships with people who do not speak the same language, and our closest physical relationships need not make use of words, although they usually do so. Many people regard physical intimacy with another person as impossible to verbalize, as deeper than anything which words can convey.

Linguistic analysts distinguish prosodic features of speech from syntactic: stress, pitch, volume, emphasis, and any other features conveying emotional significance, as opposed to grammatical structure or literal meaning. There are many similarities between prosodic communication and music. Infants respond to the rhythm, pitch, intensity, and timbre of the mother’s voice; all of which are part of music.

Such elements are manifestly important in poetry, but they can also be in prose. As a modern example, we can consider James Joyce’s experiments with the sound of words which are particularly evident in his later works.

But even in his earliest stories the meaning of a word did not necessarily depend on the object it denoted but on the sonority and intonation of the speaker’s voice; for even then Joyce addressed the listener rather than the reader.¹⁶

It will be recalled that Joyce had an excellent voice and considered becoming a professional singer. He described using the technical resources of music in writing the Sirens chapter of Ulysses. Joyce portrays Molly Bloom as comprehending the hurdy-gurdy boy without understanding a word of his language.

One popular Victorian notion was that music gradually developed from adult speech through a separation of the prosodic elements from the syntactic. William Pole wrote in The Philosophy of Music:

The earliest forms of music probably arose out of the natural inflections of the voice in speaking. It would be very easy to sustain the sound of the voice on one particular note, and to follow this by another sustained note at a higher or lower pitch. This, however rude, would constitute music.

We may further easily conceive that several persons might be led to join in a rude chant of this kind. If one acted as leader, others, guided by the natural instinct of their ears, would imitate him, and thus we might get a combined unison song.¹⁷

Dr Pole’s original lectures, on which his book is based, were given in 1877, and bear the impress of their time, with frequent references to savages, barbarians, and the like. Although The Philosophy of Music is still useful, Pole shows little appreciation of the fact that music amongst pre-literate peoples might be as complex as our own. Twenty years earlier, in 1857, Herbert Spencer had advanced a similar theory of the origins of music, which was published in Fraser’s Magazine.^*† Spencer noted that when speech became emotional the sounds produced spanned a greater tonal range and thus came closer to music. He therefore proposed that the sounds of excited speech became gradually uncoupled from the words which accompanied them, and so came to exist as separate sound entities, forming a ‘language’ of their own.

Darwin came to an opposite conclusion. He supposed that music preceded speech and arose as an elaboration of mating calls. He observed that male animals which possess a vocal apparatus generally use their voices most when under the influence of sexual feelings. A sound which was originally used to attract the attention of a potential mate might gradually be modified, elaborated, and intensified.

The suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or the females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm. The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his various tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions during their mutual courtship and rivalry.¹⁸

Géza Révész reproduced another theory of the origin of music, which was first advanced by Carl Stumpf, although Révész makes no direct acknowledgement to this earlier author. It is based on the perception that the singing voice has greater carrying power than the speaking voice. Early man, Révész supposes, when wishing to communicate with his fellows at a distance, discovered that he could do so more effectively by using a singing voice rather than a speaking voice. Révész affirms that giving vent to loud, resounding signals produces pleasure, and remembers his own delight in making his voice ring out into wide open spaces. He assumes that such calls can pass over into song quite easily. In other words, he tries to derive all music from the yodel.

It is true that musical sounds are used by pre-literate people for communication at a distance, and that wind instruments of considerable carrying power have been invented for this purpose. Allegedly, the Mura Indians of the Amazon communicate with each other across the great rivers in a special musical language which they play on a three-holed flageolet.¹⁹ Signalling by means of drums and horns is a widespread practice in Africa and elsewhere. Even so, communication using musical sounds is not itself music, and there is no direct evidence that such signals became transmuted into music.

Révész’s theory also fails to account for the rhythmic element in music, which ethnomusicologists find to be fundamentally important. Neither Révész nor Darwin nor Spencer are able to tell us why music became attractive to early men or their descendants.²⁰

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was not only a revolutionary social theorist but also an accomplished composer, argued that musical sounds accompanied or preceded speech as we know it. In his biography of Rousseau, Maurice Cranston recounts from the Essai sur l’origine des langues Rousseau’s theory that

men first spoke to each other in order to express their passions, and that at the early stages of human society there was no distinct speech apart from song. Earliest languages, he suggests, were chanted; they were melodic and poetic rather than prosaic and practical. He also claims that it was men’s passions rather than their needs which prompted their first utterances, for passions would drive men towards others, whereas the necessities of life would impel each to seek his satisfaction alone. ‘It is not hunger or thirst, but love, hatred, pity and anger which drew from men their first vocal utterances.’ Primitive men sing to one another in order to express their feelings before they come to speak to one another in order to express their thoughts.²¹

John Blacking claims that singing and dancing preceded the development of verbal interchange.

There is evidence that early human species were able to dance and sing several hundred thousand years before homo sapiens sapiens emerged with the capacity for speech as we now know it.²²

It may even have been the case, as the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico suggested, that human beings danced before they walked. He also thought that poetry came before prose, and that men naturally embodied their feelings. attitudes, and thoughts in symbols. The metaphorical use of language, according to Vico, preceded the literal or scientific; and he is not the only philosopher to think this. Heidegger wrote:

Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.²³

The objective language generally used by scientists and philosophers, which is concerned with conceptual thought and with demonstration and proof rather than with evocation, and which usually avoids metaphor as far as possible, is quite different from the ‘musical’ language used by poets, by the pre-literate, or even by those who are not highly educated in the Western tradition. ‘The magnet loves iron’ is not a scientific explanation of magnetism, but is a naturally anthropomorphic way of speaking found the world over.

A world in which men naturally talk of the lips of a vase, the teeth of a plough, the mouth of a river, a neck of land, handfuls of one thing, the heart of another, veins of minerals, bowels of the earth, murmuring waves, whistling winds and smiling skies, groaning tables and weeping willows^* – such a world must be deeply and systematically different from any in which such phrases are felt, even remotely, to be metaphorical, as contrasted with so-called literal speech. This is one of Vico’s most revolutionary discoveries.²⁴

As Isaiah Berlin points out, all the metaphors listed above are taken from the human body. When human beings looked upon the external world and tried to describe it, it was natural that they did so in terms of their own subjective, physical experience. The language of science had not yet become dissociated from the language of poetry and music, and the notion that the phenomena of the external world could only be understood if anthropomorphism was excluded had not yet developed. The behaviourist idea that human beings can only properly be comprehended when their actions are observed with scientific objectivity rather than assessed by means of empathic understanding was far in the future. Vico would have agreed with John Blacking in supposing that a people’s music is one important key to understanding their culture and their relationships.

In ancient Greece, which is usually considered to be the birthplace of Western civilization, music was both ubiquitous and supremely important. Although we know little about how Greek music actually sounded, classical scholars refer to it as ‘an art which was woven into the very texture of their lives’.²⁵

As in our culture, elaborate instrumental skills were the preserve of professional musicians; but the Greeks considered that instruction in singing and in playing the lyre should be a regular part of education for every freeborn citizen. Music was an important feature of domestic celebrations, feasts, and religious rituals, and musical competitions were held alongside athletic contests. Poetry and music went hand in hand: the poetry of Homer, for example, was originally recited to the accompaniment of the lyre.

For the Greeks, music and poetry were inseparable. The poet and the composer were frequently the same person, so that often words and music were created together. The Greek word melos indicated both lyric poetry and the music to which a poem is set: it is the origin of our word ‘melody’. It is worth noting that, in spite of its mathematical connections, music accompanied the subjective language of poetry rather than the objective language of intellectual argument. We can imagine The Odyssey being chanted to musical accompaniment; we cannot imagine The Republic being similarly treated.

First of all, early poetry was song. The difference between song and speech is a matter of discontinuities of pitch. In ordinary speech, we are constantly changing pitch, even in the pronunciation of a single syllable. But in song, the change of pitch is discrete and discontinuous. Speech reels around all over a certain portion of an octave (in relaxed speech about a fifth). Song steps from note to note on strict and delimited feet over a more extended range.

Modern poetry is a hybrid. It has the metrical feet of song with the pitch glissandos of speech. But ancient poetry is much closer to song. Accents were not by intensity stressed as in our ordinary speech, but by pitch. In ancient Greece, this pitch is thought to have been precisely the interval of a fifth above the ground note of the poem, so that on the notes of our scale, dactyls would go GCC, GCC, with no extra emphasis on the G. Moreover, the three extra accents, acute, circumflex, and grave, were, as their notations , , , imply, a rising pitch within the syllable, a rising and falling on the same syllable, and a falling pitch respectively. The result was a poetry sung like plainsong with various auditory ornamentation that gave it beautiful variety.²⁶

The Greek word for this is . It cannot easily be translated; for it signifies musically determined verse, or music and poetry in one. Whereas modern Western verse is primarily linguistic, words which may or may not be set to music,

The ancient Greek verse line behaved differently. Here the musical rhythm was contained within the language itself. The musical-rhythmic structure was completely determined by the language. There was no room for an independent musical-rhythmic setting; nothing could be added or changed.²⁷

Gradually, the musical component shrank, to be replaced by a system of accents; that is, by dynamic stresses which bore little relation to the original rhythm and which were not intoned at different pitches. Thrasybulos Georgiades, from whose book Music and Language I have just quoted, thinks that the original was replaced by prose and music as separate forms. Linguistically determined poetry followed, with verse rhythms governed by stress rather than pitch. It then became possible to set both prose and poetry to music in the ways familiar to us. So language and music could be recombined where this was thought appropriate, as, for example, in the Christian liturgy; but only after their initial unity had been disrupted and their independence from each other had been established.

Rousseau may well have been right in thinking that there was no distinct speech apart from song at the beginning of history. The psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig, himself an accomplished musician, wrote:

It is not unreasonable to speculate that speech and music have descended from a common origin in a primitive language which was neither speaking nor singing, but something of both. Later this primeval language would have split into different branches; music would have retained the articulation mainly by pitch (scale) and duration (rhythm), while language chose the articulation mainly by tone colour (vowels and consonants). Language moreover happened to become the vehicle of rational thought and so underwent further influences. Music has become a symbolic language of the unconscious mind whose symbolism we shall never be able to fathom.²⁸

If song and speech were initially more closely linked, and then became separated, it is understandable that the differences in their functions became accentuated. One can imagine that, as prose became less metaphorical, less anthropomorphic, more objective, and more precise, people would use this kind of speech for conveying information and expounding ideas, whilst reserving poetic and musical communication for religious and other rituals. However, even the speech used by scientists and mathematicians to explain and convey their ideas is never entirely devoid of varieties of tone, emphasis, and pitch. If this were the case it would be so monotonous that no one would listen to it.

Today, we are accustomed to listening to instrumental music which has no necessary connection with the human voice or with public ceremonies. We have also developed language to the point at which it can be used for scientific description or for conceptual thought without prosody, metaphor, or the expression of subjective feeling. Seen from the perspective of history, these changes are recent. I think that they are also connected. If we consider together the ideas of Vico, Rousseau, and Blacking, we can perceive that language and music were originally more closely joined, and that it makes sense to think of music as deriving from a subjective, emotional need for communication with other human beings which is prior to the need for conveying objective information or exchanging ideas.

Ethnomusicologists generally emphasize the collective importance of music in the cultures they study. There are a number of cultures which, like that of ancient Greece, do not distinguish music as a separate activity from those which it invariably accompanies. Singing, dancing, the recitation of poetry, and religious chant are so inseparably linked with music that there is no word for music as such. Indeed, it may be difficult for the observer to determine whether a particular activity includes music or does not. Ceremonial speech may, as in the case of Greek poetry, include rhythmic and melodic patterns which are so much part of it that words and music cannot really be differentiated.

The origins of music may be lost in obscurity but, from its earliest beginnings, it seems to have played an essential part in social interaction. Music habitually accompanies religious and other ceremonies. Some anthropologists have speculated that vocal music may have begun as a special way of communicating with the supernatural; a way which shared many of the features of ordinary speech, but which was also distinctive.²⁹

Stravinsky would have agreed with this suggestion. In his Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in 1939–40 he unequivocally affirms that ‘the profound meaning of music and its essential aim … is to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow man and with the Supreme Being.’³⁰

In pre-literate societies the arts are usually intimately connected with rituals and ceremonies which are dissociated from the routines of ordinary day-to-day living. As Ellen Dissanayake has cogently observed, the arts are concerned with ‘making special’; that is, with underlining and rendering ritualized forms of behaviour.³¹ In ritual, words are used metaphorically and symbolically and often reunited with music, which still further charges them with meaning. Raymond Firth, the anthropologist who wrote with such insight about Tikopia and other Pacific communities, states

Even songs, as a rule, are not composed simply to be listened to for pleasure. They have work to do, to serve as funeral dirges, as accompaniments to dancing, or to serenade a lover.³²

Pre-literate societies have very little idea of the individual as a separate entity. They regard the individual as indissolubly part of the family, and the family as part of the larger society. Ritual and aesthetic activities are integral parts of social existence, not superstructures or luxuries which only the rich can afford. Amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, music plays an important part in initiation ceremonies, work, dancing, religious worship, political protest – in fact in every collective activity. Especially important is tshikona, the national dance. This music can only be produced when

twenty or more men blow differently tuned pipes with a precision that depends on holding one’s own part as well as blending with others, and at least four women play different drums in polyrhythmic harmony.³³

This description disposes of the notion that the music of rural African societies is less developed or less complex than our own: it is simply different. Tshikona is highly valued. It raises the spirits of everyone who participates. Blacking thinks this is because its performance generates the highest degree of individuality in the largest possible community; a combination of opposites rarely achieved. Playing in a modern Western orchestra or singing in a large choir may be enjoyable and uplifting, but neither activity provides much scope for individuality.

Music contributes both to the continuity and the stability of a culture whether pre-literate or not. That ardent collector of folksongs, Béla Bartók, deploring the changes brought about by the First World War and realizing that the type of music produced by a particular culture is inseparable from the nature of that culture, wrote:

I had the great privilege to be a close observer of an as yet homogeneous, but unfortunately rapidly disappearing social structure, expressing itself in music.³⁴

The triumph of the West and the case of modern communication have caused the disappearance of different musics, as they have also diminished the number of spoken languages.

John A. Sloboda, a psychologist at the University of Keele, argues that pre-literate cultures may have even more need of music than our own.

Society requires organization for its survival. In our own society we have many complex artefacts which help us to externalize and objectify the organizations we need and value. Primitive cultures have few artefacts, and the organization of the society must be expressed to a greater extent through transient actions and the way people interact with each other. Music, perhaps, provides a unique mnemonic framework within which humans can express, by the temporal organization of sound and gesture, the structure of their knowledge and of social relations. Songs and rhythmically organized poems and sayings form the major repository of knowledge in non-literate cultures. This seems to be because such organized sequences are much easier to remember than the type of prose which literate societies use in books.³⁵

Johann Gottfried Herder, supposedly the father of European nationalism, had made a similar observation in the eighteenth century.

All unpolished peoples sing and act; they sing about what they do and thus sing histories. Their songs are the archives of their people, the treasury of their science and religion.³⁶

The music of the Australian aboriginals remained free from outside influences, and unknown to the West, until the arrival of the British two centuries ago.

Since all their knowledge, beliefs, and customs, upon whose strict preservation through exact ritual observance the constant renewal of nature (and hence their own survival) was held to depend, were enshrined in and transmitted by their sacred song-cycles, it is reasonable to think that theirs is the oldest extant, still practised music in the world. Since they had no form of writing or notation, oral tradition was the only means of retaining and inculcating their lore, and music therefore provided the essential mnemonic medium. As such it was invested with the utmost power, secrecy, and value.³⁷

Bruce Chatwin, in his fascinating book The Songlines, demonstrates how songs served to divide up the land, and constituted title-deeds to territory. Each totemic ancestor was believed to have sung as he walked and to have defined the features of the landscape in so doing. Song was the means by which the different aspects of the world were brought into consciousness, and therefore remembered. As Chatwin observed, aboriginals used songs in the same way as birds to affirm territorial boundaries. Each individual inherited some verses of the Ancestor’s song, which also determined the limits of a particular area. The contour of the melody of the song described the contour of the land with which it was associated. As Chatwin’s informant told him: ‘Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.’³⁸

When the tribe met to sing their own song-cycle on ritual occasions, song-owners had to sing their particular verses in the right order. Songs also transcended language barriers and constituted a means of communication between individuals who could not communicate in other ways.

When a culture is under threat, music may become even more significant. Bruno Nettl, Professor of Musicology and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, discussing the music of the Flathead Indians, suggests that

the uses of music in Flathead culture are mainly to accompany other activities, perhaps in order to validate them as done in a properly Flathead fashion … Music supports tribal integrity when many peoples, whites and other Indian tribes, because of the onset of modernization and Westernization, come into a position of influencing the Flathead.³⁹

E. O. Wilson, the Harvard socio-biologist, writes that, in primitive cultures,

Singing and dancing serve to draw groups together, direct the emotions of the people, and prepare them for joint action.⁴⁰

One joint action for which sounds produced by musical instruments may help to prepare people is that of warfare. Attacks upon enemies are often initiated by blowing horns and trumpets which both arouses the aggressiveness of the attackers and is supposed to terrify the enemy.

The Muras and other tribes of the Orinoco region performed wild overtures on horns before commencing their attack; the Samoans blew conch-shells, and the savages of Guiana began their advance with a screech of horns and trumpets.⁴¹

Such sounds are also used to frighten away evil spirits.

Music can sometimes symbolize rebellion. It may be permissible to express anti-government attitudes in songs, the words of which would invite arrest if they appeared in a newspaper article. Under some regimes, night-club satirists are given a licence denied to the ordinary citizen. The song ‘Lilliburlero’ became an epitome of anti-Catholic sentiments, and is said to have contributed to the revolution of 1688 and to the subsequent defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne.

Continuity and stability are served by tunes which everybody knows; but music can also create new patterns of joint experience. Blacking gives examples of African drum patterns which when combined and performed by several players can create new cultural products.

Through musical interaction, two people create forms that are greater than the sum of their parts, and make for themselves experiences of empathy that would be unlikely to occur in ordinary social intercourse.⁴²

The mnemonic power of music is still evident in modern culture. Many of us remember the words of songs and poems more accurately than we can remember prose. That music facilitates memory has been objectively confirmed by the study of mentally retarded children who can recall more material after it is given to them in a song than after it is read to them as a story.⁴³

Some people who are primarily interested in classical music are disturbed to find that they recall the words and lyrics of popular songs more easily than they remember the music which means most to them. I think this is because popular songs are simple, endlessly repeated and difficult to avoid. This also accounts for their nostalgic quality. Anniversary ‘evenings out’ are seldom accompanied by the ‘Eroica’. Repetition can make any type of music memorable. Professional musicians, especially conductors and instrumental soloists, are required to remember huge quantities of classical music, and can usually do so without too much difficulty because they have studied it and played it repeatedly.

In Western societies the importance of music as a means of defining and identifying a culture has declined, but it has not disappeared. Particular pieces of music continue to be associated with particular societies, and come to represent them in the same way as a national flag. ‘They are playing our tune’ is a phrase which can have a much wider significance than our habitual reference of it to the courtship memories of a mated couple. In Britain we never refer to ‘God Save the Queen’ as ‘our tune’; nevertheless it symbolizes the structure of our society and the allegiance which is still expected of us. It is ironic but not inexplicable that in the USA the same tune is used for ‘My Country, ‘tis of Thee’. To play the hymn ‘Abide With Me’ at football matches is in dubious taste; but those who join in singing it feel an enhanced sense of joint participation, even if they do not believe the words which they are singing, or subscribe to the Christian beliefs which the hymn expresses.

It is not surprising that Church leaders have doubted whether the feelings which music arouses are genuinely religious. Music’s power to fan the flame of piety may be more apparent than real; more concerned with enhancing group feeling within the congregation than with promoting the individual’s relation with God. St Augustine reveals that he was so entranced by the pleasures of sound that he feared that his intellect was sometimes paralysed by the gratification of his senses. On the other hand, the beauty of music could also aid the recovery of faith.

So I waver between the danger that lies in gratifying the sense and the benefits which, as I know, can accrue from singing. Without committing myself to an irrevocable opinion, I am inclined to approve of the custom of singing in church, in order that by indulging the ears weaker spirits may be inspired with feelings of devotion. Yet when I find the singing itself more moving than the truth which it conveys. I confess that this is a grievous sin, and at those times I would prefer not to hear the singer.⁴⁴

It will never be possible to establish the origins of human music with any certainty; however, it seems probable that music developed from the prosodic exchanges between mother and infant which foster the bond between them. From this, it became a form of communication between adult human beings. As the capacity for speech and conceptual thought developed, music became less important as a way of conveying information, but retained its significance as a way of communicating feelings and cementing bonds between individuals, especially in group situations. Today, we are so accustomed to considering the response of the individual to music that we are liable to forget that, for most of its history, music has been predominantly a group activity. Music began by serving communal purposes, of which religious ritual and warfare are two examples. It has continued to be used as an accompaniment to collective activities; as an adjunct to social ceremonies and public occasions. We share these functions of music with pre-literate cultures. In our society, one cannot imagine a Coronation or a State funeral taking place in the absence of music. We know less than we would like about what musical activities went on in the past in private houses; but it is important to recall that the modern concert, in which instrumental music is performed in a public concert hall as a separate entity unaccompanied by voices and in the absence of any ceremony, was not a prominent feature of musical life in England until the late seventeenth century. Since then, music as a distinct form in its own right has continued to grow in importance. During the same period, the performer has become more sharply differentiated from the listener. The individual listener’s response to music is a principal theme of this book.

*For example, Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica.

*Pole makes passing reference to this in one footnote, but makes no acknowledgement to Spencer.

*All these examples are taken directly from Vico’s Sanza Nova.