Tag: #Music

The Xylophone is a very simple instrument, perhaps one of the first Fisher-Price toys you had as a kid. Bang a stick on different colored bits of metal to make different sounds. The xylophone is also one of the most ancient of inventions, replicated in different ways over time and across cultures, with different names. Same principle. Hit something with a stick and make music. The music produced isn’t always simple; in 2019, music professor Lee Hinkle of the University of Maryland performed a 21-scene solo opera on the xylophone.

Today, the sounds are made with metal or plastic, but for centuries they were made on wood and on stone. Ancient xylophones may have appeared first in the Far East, especially the Southeast, an area passed over by archaeologists. People made them throughout Africa, where they still play them today. Sometimes the wood or rocks were chosen and arranged together. In other places, the rocks that made music were part of the where people lived, at least to the imaginative. If the music is made from rocks, those instruments have a special name: lithophones. Some of those lithophones may just be 12,000 years old.

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.