M is for Music

It warms the cockles of my heart to know that music was invented before royal government archives. Much as I am in favor of libraries, yesterday’s topic, I don’t think we need the blow-by-blow details of every king’s battle conquests as much as we need music. Whether it’s a single fiddle playing out “Danny Boy” or a full-blown choir and symphony, ringing out with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” music reaches the heart and mind at once.

Archaeomusicologists must be very jealous of art archaeologists. While we might debate, as we did with the “Kiss,” whether a 15,000-year-old smear of paint was two people or a moose, at least we have a picture. We don’t have any recordings of 30,000-year-old flute or kithara players, and there’s disagreement over whether bits of bone and stone are even instruments. Yet, by the time the great cities of the world built their palaces–in Assyria, Memphis, Knossos, the Indus Valley, or Shaanxi–music was a significant part of the culture. We can see paintings of musicians and dancers and know that there must have been intricate choreography and complex arrangements. Somehow, we got from a couple of holes in a bear femur to Coachella, Egyptian-style.

Today’s key questions are:

1. What defines music in an archaeological sense?
2. Where and where was the first music created, and how do we know?
3. What kind of similarities did we see across cultures who used music?

Survival of the Euphonious

Darwin thought that humans evolved to be more musical, i.e. that musicianship became built in Homo sapiens DNA. He compared humans to birds and claimed: “I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.” In other words, sexual selection was the driving force behind the development of the potential to make music.

There are a lot of problems with that theory, not the least of which is that it doesn’t explain why we all aren’t musically talented. However, it’s also true that the horse-shaped hyoid bone developed in hominids around 300,000 ya. Anthropologists argue that the structure of the hyoid and larynx shifted to allow Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans (EMH) to talk and to sing. While animals do communicate with sound, and the hooting of apes is a kind of tonal orchestra, humans gained significant control over their ability to communicate. And are a lot more pleasant than sounds at the zoo.

We don’t know what the first songs sounded like, but it’s easy to imagine that if humans became able to hum, they might start thinking about tones and notes and melodies. It’s a next logical step to reproducing those with a voice or with a separate object. If you’ve ever heard someone play a series of partially-full glasses, you know that musicians can hear sounds in anything. Those notes in sequence become a melody, core to music.

The other core piece to music is rhythm. Yes, the Internet tells me there are 5-10-12-15 “essential elements” to music, but let’s think like a cavewoman who has a voice and a couple of rocks. At best, she will notice that different rocks make different sounds–as she can–and that she can tap the rocks fast or slow, loud or soft, with or without pause. And voila! we have Sheila E! to make music, you need rhythm and notes.

One ancient instrument still in use among many indigenous cultures (Africa, Australia) is a bull-roarer. This is a piece of wood attached to a string, but a proficient player can change the frequency of the tones as well as speed up or slow down the circular rhythm. Bull-roarers date back 19,000 years, making them one of the oldest musical instruments, and one that showcases both tone and rhythm together. However, it’s not the oldest.

The Oldest Musical Holes in the World

They’ve been found in multiple ancient excavations: China, Germany, India, Croatia, and Israel. Look up “oldest musical instrument” in any region, and you’re probably going to find it. The Bone Flute.

The Divje Babe flute, found in Croatia in the 1990s, is claimed to be the oldest discovered musical instrument. That designation is still hotly debated. Archaeologist Ivan Turk, who discovered the piece of bear femur, believed the holes were from bear teeth. I’m not an archaeologist, but the holes seem pretty evenly spaced for that, don’t they? Here’s the big problem–the site was one for Neanderthals, dating back 40-55,000 years old. For a long time, and I’ve noted this in other posts, Neanderthals were deemed incapable of symbolic thought, like the kind you’d need to make music. There seems to be a lot of Neando-racism in archaeology.

At the same time, other flutes have been discovered in caves in Germany. Called the Aurignacian flutes, these are also made of bone or ivory, and date back to 35-43,000 ya. These flutes are more complete (see image top of post) and made by Homo sapiens, so there’s been no controversy. What does seem clear is that different hominids in different places, who probably did not look up how to make them on Google, created bone flutes. These early hunters took their leftover animal femurs (or mammoth tusks), hollowed them out, and poked holes.

We all learned to play recorders in elementary school. Mine is still in a box somewhere, and my kid’s are stuffed in the piano bench. They aren’t easy to play for those of us who did not get Darwin’s memo, but we understand that hollow tubes with holes can produce different tones. It’s probably why so many cultures, thousands of years ago, across the world, created their own bone flutes.

The flute became a core instrument across cultures. Across Grecian urns and kylixes, you can find the double-flute (dialous) played as accompaniment to–not making this up–the long jump at the ancient Olympics. On this ancient amphora, you can even see the jumper with the hand weights about to lift off.

Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart

Blowing into bones or whipping bits of wood around on a string were ways that our Paleolithic ancestors created music. While flutes were part of many early cultures, stringed instruments were also easy to create.

Like the bull roarer, a bow can also easily be created with a string draped across a curved piece of wood. I wrote in the very first post that bows and arrows more than 50,000 years earlier. The archers who used them must have noticed that the strings made noise. Many might have played around with them in various positions, when not hunting, to create songs. Flip over the bow, and you have a chordophone, the technical name for the entire class of stringed instruments. Again, there are folks who still play these, but that should not be surprising. Even today, we still use string instruments with animal parts, catgut or horsehair, following the processes of our forebearers.

If you can run one sinew of string across a bow, you can run many. Hence, the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Minoan/Greek cultures created entire chamber orchestras of strings, including the harp, lyre, and the cithara. The harp ran strings of different lengths at an angle. The lyre, which came to be tightly associated with Apollo, had strings of the same length but of different thickness or tension. Lyres were widely played in Sumeria (2500 BCE) and Egypt (2000 BCE).

The cithara dates back to at least 1700 BCE and was one of the stringed instruments that was used across Mediterranean cultures, although the Minoans and later Greeks get the credit. The kithara–Greeks couldn’t cope with words that began with c— was taller than the lyre and had a large soundbox on the bottom.

I don’t really understand the scientific mechanics of music, but the basic idea is that if you put the strings on a box with a hole in it, the sound will get amplified. Think of a guitar or violin; there are strings, but also the wooden air-holding part which makes the strings resonate more than if you were plucking a bow. Thus, some think the kithara was the precursor to the modern violin.

Hurrian Hymn

We’ve explored the origins of a few types of musical instruments. What about songs? As a hint, I plan to cover lyrics/text/poetry in a later essay–guess which letter? It’s coming up.

Musical notation is a different thing entirely. Certainly, written songs from 10,000 BCE aren’t available, since writing hadn’t been invented. We don’t know if they sat around the fire, singing “Kumbara” in Clan of the Cave Bear. They had the hyoid bones and the flute, so they could have.

We have no information about how they shared great tunes and riffs with each other, at least not until 1950 BCE. That’s when the Sumerians first wrote down cuneiform instructions for how to tune a lyre. Not exactly the diatonic scale, but at least it was about the music and not the words. The folks in Ugarit–Ugarit was a city in modern day Syria, @1500 BCE –went one step further. An Ugarit musician (Ugarician?) wrote a fairly complete set of instructions for a group of songs called the Hurrian hymns.

This Hurrian Hymn–I can’t help but think of her ‘n’ him like matching bath towels–is in praise to the goddess Nikkal. The lyrics are in a different section, but this part is a rough explanation of how the musician should play and descriptions of “notes” in terms of tones that are different. It’s also controversial. Naturally, someone had to translate from cuneiform and translation into music, so the “um, actually” crowd likes to pick at whether it really was notes or whether the interpretation was correct and blah blah. It’s speculative not accurate and so on.

Archaeology is easily subject to Internet trolls, too. It’s easy to say things are speculative or inaccurate, but the whole damn thing is speculative. Until we have a time machine, we’re all guessing. Unless you were there, you don’t really know that it’s wrong, if you say it’s inaccurate or speculative. Unless you were there, this translation may be as good as any other. Certainly, the transcription created in the mid-1970s, which several folks have covered on Youtube, sounds pretty good.

Take a listen to this one by Bluegum Counterpart. (It’s lovely, but also just like a musician to fiddle around drinking water and tuning for 20 seconds before he starts playing. I feel like I’m sitting in that audience back in Ugarit, looking at my watch…)

I think in the end, archaeomusicologists are the ones who get the last laugh. There is no word for someone who studies art+archaeology. They’re simply called art historians, which really belongs to the snooty museum types and also is a misnomer since cave paintings are prehistoric (they should be art prehistorians). Musicologist is already a better term, then when you add that archaeo on top, it’s just fun.

I wouldn’t mind being a Paleoarchaeomusicologist. That’s a word that just sings, doesn’t it?